Facing Difficulties in the Acquisition of the English Passive by L 1 Speakers of Hungarian Enik ő TANKÓ (original) (raw)
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Facing Difficulties in the Acquisition of the English Passive by L1 Speakers of Hungarian
acta.sapientia.ro
Hungarian learners of English encounter difficulties when learning the passive constructions. Based on my classroom experience, passive is one of the most difficult phenomena when it comes to teaching it, and therefore it is well worth some investigation. Furthermore, the direct method does not allow possibilities for presenting Hungarian structures corresponding to the passive voice in English, as a consequence Hungarian students learning English as a foreign language use the passive constructions erroneously or will totally avoid using them. The present paper will demonstrate with empirical evidence that, leaving the direct method aside for a while, presenting properly the characteristics of the English passive and its Hungarian counterpart structures, with some practice, we can get students to understand, form and use the passive constructions in appropriate contexts. The intervention provides a methodological model for teaching the English passive voice.
Passive Constructions – Strangers among L1 Speakers of Hungarian?
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica
Does knowledge of Romanian, more exactly of Romanian passive voice, help learning the English passive construction? Or is it the other way round: knowledge of English helps students learning Romanian? Perhaps L2 and L3 mutually influence each other in the case of Hungarian students from Miercurea Ciuc? In previous studies addressing the problems encountered by L1 speakers of Hungarian in the acquisition of the English passive voice (Tankó 2011, 2014), I presumed that possessing Romanian to various degrees represented a facilitating factor in the acquisition of the passive given that Romanian, like English, has a well-developed, explicitly-taught passive construction. Of course, speakers of Hungarian living in Romania might be influenced to some extent by their knowledge of Romanian when learning the English passive voice - yet, the question is to what extent. Thus, an important element of this study represents identifying students’ level of Romanian and their production of Romanian ...
2015
The main question to be investigated is to what extent native speakers of Hungarian understand and acquire the English passive voice, as there is no generalized syntactic passive construction in Hungarian . As we will show, native speakers of Hungarian tend to use the predicative verbal adverbial construction when translating English passive sentences, as this construction is the closest syntactic equivalent of the English passive voice. Another question to be investigated is whether L2 Romanian works as a facilitating factor in the process of acquiring the L3 English passive voice. If all our subjects, Hungarian students living in Romania, were Hungarian-Romanian bilinguals, it would be obvious that knowledge of Romanian helps them in acquiring the English passive. However, as it will be shown, the bilingualism hypothesis is disconfirmed. Still, passive knowledge of Romanian influences to some extent the acquisition of the English passive voice .
On some Hungarian means of expression of passive contents
Studia Linguistica Hungarica
Hungarian is widely considered as a language without any productive morphological passive, while some linguists insist on the idea of a Hungarian analytical stative passive. This paper examines the use of genuine morphosyntactic word formation means and alternatives which express passive contents, focusing mainly on the clause level. According to the mainstream definition of passive in cognitive linguistics, passive is defined as a reversal of the focal participants (trajector and landmark). After an overview of the most important functions of the usage of passive, the paper discusses Hungarian means of expression for passive content andpassive-equivalents known and described in the Hungarian literature. The theoretical part is followed by the presentation of an empirical survey concerning the means of expression of passive in Hungarian. The first analysis investigates the constructions expressing passive contents in a corpus consisting of scientific texts in an explorative way. Aft...
L2 Romanian Influence in the Acquisition of the English Passive by L1 Speakers of Hungarian
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2015
The main question to be investigated is to what extent native speakers of Hungarian understand and acquire the English passive voice, as there is no generalized syntactic passive construction in Hungarian. As we will show, native speakers of Hungarian tend to use the predicative verbal adverbial construction when translating English passive sentences, as this construction is the closest syntactic equivalent of the English passive voice. Another question to be investigated is whether L2 Romanian works as a facilitating factor in the process of acquiring the L3 English passive voice. If all our subjects, Hungarian students living in Romania, were Hungarian-Romanian bilinguals, it would be obvious that knowledge of Romanian helps them in acquiring the English passive. However, as it will be shown, the bilingualism hypothesis is disconfirmed. Still, passive knowledge of Romanian influences to some extent the acquisition of the English passive voice.
Acquisition of Passives: A Semantico-Pragmatic Approach
IBAD Journal of Social Sciences, 2019
This paper presents a general review of literature in terms of acquisition of passives as well as providing new theoretical insights considering the semantics and pragmatics of passives, which are thought to be the underlying reasons of difficulty. There is a disagreement in the literature as to whether passive structures are difficult and if so, what may be the underlying causes of this difficulty. Based on the arguments presented in the literature, the syntactic hypothesis (Wexler 2004) and the incremental processing hypothesis (Trueswell and Gleitman 2004) stand out. Wexler’s syntactic hypothesis is that children regard all vP’s and CP’s as strong phases, which makes non-grammatical passives for them, which is the source of the difficulty. In the meantime, in both cases (syntax or incremental processing), frequency plays a major role in boosting the acquisition process by either making children be faster at reassigning thematic roles, which is the source of difficulty according to incremental processing hypothesis, or making children be aware of the fact that vPs are not strong phases, thereby making passives grammatical, so that children can use them. Finally, in this study, a theoretical analysis based on semantic and pragmatical perspectives is presented to explain why passive structures are difficult to acquire in some languages because the studies on passive structures in the literature neglect the meaning component. In this study, the introspective semantics model (Von Fintel and Heim 2011) was used to provide a new theoretical perspective on the acquisition of passive structures.
Error Analysis of Passive in the Writings of Albanian Learners of English
ANGLISTICUM. Journal of the Association-Institute for English Language and American Studies, 2020
The aim of this thesis is the analysis of errors commonly madein the 9-th grade students in urban and rural Albanian schools in the academic year 2018-2019 in using the passive voice. A quantitative approach is applied in conducting the research. The samples of the research are24 students in both schools, 12 students in each school. The descriptive analysis method is going to beused in this research to find the errors of the students and to analyze the data. "The major focus of this study is the Contrastive Analysis between the English passive forms through their Albanian correspondents; contribute to the theoretical linguistics, to the general theory of contrastive linguistics, to the development of contrastive studies in Albanian, to the development of Albanian prescriptive grammars." 1 They are the theories of English grammar, Error analysis, and Language Teaching and Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. Theory of English grammar was used to know and understand the structure of English passive voice.While, the theory of error analysis was used to analyze the student' errors based on the Linguistic Category Taxonomy particularly for the English passive voice, and Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis was used to find out the similarity and the difference between English and Albanian passive voice. My assumption is that the difficulties the Albanian learners of English face are due to the following: 1. English and Albanian being typologically two different languages, bilingual ones: a. English as a typical analytical language. 2 b.The paradigm of the verb in the Albanian language is very wealthy in word-form. It includes 251 analytic and synthetic forms, from them, 49 are synthetic forms. These synthetic forms are built mostly using two grammatical tools: "ndajshtesat eptimore" which play the main role, in the verb eptim, and morphological changing, to which play not only the matter role in the grammatical forms building. 3 2. The English language in comparison with the Albanian and other languages has a lot of similarities and differences in passives. In the following study, research is to point out and to find differences and similarities between English and Albanian passives. Both of those languages have to be understood by the learners prior to learning the target language. First, besides, the Albanian learners in learning the English language are frequently influenced by Albanian structure and to transfer the forms and meanings from Albanian native language to the English language. Second, the results of data analysis clearly show that most passives are marked with ''jam'' dhe ''folje ne te tashme'' dhe ''pjesore e shkuar e disa foljeve te shqipes ne prapashtesa-re (ne bere),-ar (ne punuar)'', which are also translated into passive in English ('be' plus 'past participle') plus 'byagent''. Some passives, namely translated into passives in English and some others are translated into actives. Third, in translating Albanian passives into English shifts inevitably take place on a grammatical level, on the aspect of tense. Part of the study is transitive, non-transitive, infinitives, its structure and the omission of it, participles and its comprehensions, gerunds, the structure and the use of them that change a lot from both languages, including the forms of-ing in comparing to English, the forms of ''pa larë, me të larë dhe një të larë'', which do not have forms, changing the forms of tenses, the use of ''by-phrase'', passive clauses, incorrectness of ''be'' and its omission, the correct use of conditionals, the misspelling of modals, wrong using of the order of passives, misformation of conditionals, the future ''going to'', modals, passive infinitives all in passives.
Difficulties in Learning and Producing Passive Voice
2016
This study examines how learners learning English produce and judge English passive voice structures. The ultimate goal of this study is to contribute to an understanding of the extent, nature and sources of learners' persistent difficulties with some syntactic properties of the language they are acquiring. It is to examine whether word order errors in the production of English passive voice by L2 learners stem from lack of knowledge or from difficulties with automatic implementation of L2 procedures. To examine whether errors in the production of English passive voice by L2 learners (in our case, English) can be attributed to transfer of L1 (in our case, Albanian) properties and vice versa, Albanian and English patterns are compared. Taken together, the facts indicate that difficulties with English passive voice structures are a consistent phenomenon in L2 acquisition, and do not follow in a direct way from properties of the L1. Furthermore, the facts show that learners' errors are associated with some syntactic configurations, suggesting that L2 learners divert similar grammatical hypotheses and make use of similar mechanisms for language acquisition.
Making Students More Active in Learning the Passive
Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 2015
Why are students of English so reluctant to use the passive voice? The answer to this question may lie in the fact that students find it artificial, even pretentious, partly because it really does tend to be overtly wordy and cumbersome. Moreover, a point often overlooked is that the Croatian language "favours" the active structure as more natural both in informal and formal discourse, which is why students often find it difficult to adopt the passive voice as characteristic of the English language. Also, both for learners of English and native speakers of the language, the passive structure may be felt as contrary to the more common subjectverb-object (or SO -V) order of syntactic constituents in the transitive sentence, employed profusely in the majority of Indo-European languages. Nonetheless, not only is it expected of the students to appreciate the passive, but also to use it competently. A great deal of academic English courses focus on formal communication; which makes the passive of key importance to understanding the type of language prevalent in EAP. This type of discourse is essential to studying English at university level, in the authors' case ESP in the field of international relations and diplomacy, where study materials abound with passive structures. The aim of the paper is to show that the passive is fairly simple and easy both to understand and apply in independent production since it follows a set of formulaic instructions with little or no exceptions to the rule. It will look into examples of texts such as newspaper articles, legislation, professional literature, etc., and provide various activities used as a springboard for the acquisition of passive structures.
Canadian Journal of Language and Literature Studies
For more than a decade, many studies have emphasized a transformational rule for active passive construction that an object becomes a subject in passive voice with little attention paid to an extent to which the universal grammar and the semantic roles of subject and object constrain the kinds of second language active-passive forms which are possible but not acceptable in English second language learning contexts. This structural approach for active-passive constructions poses significant syntactic and semantic problems for English language learners. Therefore, this qualitative study analysed the corpus of active-passive constructions to determine the semantic constraints learners violate in constructing passive voice. Content analysis was used as a method of data collection through which faulty passive structures were identified from First-year English language learners' scripts. The findings revealed learners' difficulties on active-passive construction in relation objects which bear the following semantic roles: locative role, measurement and value, objects functioning as adjectives. These findings imply that the students lack adequate knowledge of both grammar and pragmatics which could enable them to construct and use the English passive sentence appropriately. This could be attributed to rule-based teaching. Therefore, this paper encourages teachers and lecturers to concern themselves with not only the extent to which universal grammar may be available to second language learners, but also the extent to which universal grammar constrain the kinds of possible constructions second language learners can come up with. The paper also recommends the adoption of network based teaching from the point of three perspectives: structural, cognitive and socio-cognitive perspectives as the three complement one another to account for semantic constraints in the teaching-learning of active-passive constructions.