It is important to emphasize that the uses of the general present tense are highly conventionalized in academic writing in English and that the verb tenses must meet the requirements of
Trang 1o To correct these types of errors, a past time adverbial marker needs to be inserted to reframe the context for the present time
and tense (e.g., Last quarter, student studied hard, and now he gets
good grades').
• In other occurrences of mixed present and past tenses, one verb may refer to an activity that takes place in the general present, but
another verb denotes a past-tense activity (e.g., *When the market
moves up and down every day, the fund manager issued a new policy) In
this sentence, both tenses—present and past—are used logically:
The market moves every day refers to an action that is generally true,
whereas the fund manager took a onetime, past-tense action to
is-sue a new policy In this case, the inconsistent use of tenses can be
corrected in two ways:
(1) by inserting an adverbial or other marker (such as an
adjec-tive) to reframe the context for a different tense (and time) as
dis-cussed earlier, or
(2) by changing the past tense to the general present tense to
match the other verb(s) (e.g., When the market moves up and down
every day, the fund manager issues a new policy).
The problem with merely changing the tense of the verb, as in (2), is this correction may appear factually untruthful to the writer—if it is known that the past time action of the manager's issuing a new policy is a factual past time event.
It is important to emphasize that the uses of the general present
tense are highly conventionalized in academic writing in English and
that the verb tenses must meet the requirements of the conventions
even when they may appear to be somewhat factually incorrect.
The following extended example demonstrates various inconsistent uses of tenses in an excerpt from a student's paper on efficiency in public administration:
Every country in the world has [simple present] many problems such as pollution, unemployment, crime, war, and so on And in most modern countries, the government
takes [simple present] a role to solve these problems It w [simple present] due to the fact that any individual or organization can't afford [simple present] to manage costs
to do this As society becomes [simple present] more complicated, the government
ex-panded [simple past] its role dramatically.
The fundamental services, which we use [simple present] every day such as water,
gas, electricity, public transportation were produced [simple past] by individual
ven-dors But there was [simple past] a critical problem with these individual suppliers,
and in industrial societies the government provides [simple past] these services It is_
Trang 2TEACHING VERB TENSES AND VOICE 159
[simple present] a question whether the government really provides [simple pres-ent] these services as efficiently as possible Actually, it was [simple past] the funda-mental question in public administration, since public administration began [simple past] as an independent discipline.
As one solution to this problem, Luther Gulick presents [simple present] some princi-ples of public administration to improve efficiency According to his suggestion, a higher level of efficiency can be achieved [simple present] by specialization of tasks Gulick's principles also mentioned [simple past] how to improve efficiency in public administra-tion, such as unity of command, process, and clients These principles are called [simple present] the principles of efficiency, and they became [simple past] the focus of research Many scholars present [simple present] new principles every day, when public de-manded [simple past] more public services and goods from the government.
(Extracted from a student paper on efficiency in public administration.) Throughout the text, the present-tense verbs are mixed with those in the past tense Most of the inconsistent uses of tenses can be corrected (or pre-vented) by employing the types of corrections discussed earlier For example,
• As society becomes [simple present] more complicated, the government
ex-panded [simple past] O [expands—simple present] its role dramatically.
• In the past/In the 1920s/In the early days, the fundamental services,
which we use [simple present] every day such as water, gas, electricity, public transportation were produced [simple past] by individual vendors.
• But in those days/at that time/during that period, there was [simple past] a critical problem with these individual suppliers, and in to-day's/current/modern industrial societies the government provides
[sim-ple present] these services.
• Today/These days/Currently it is [simple present] a question whether
the government really provides [simple present] these services as
effi-ciently as possible.
• Actually, it was [simple past] the initial/early/original/old fundamental
question in public administration, since the time/the beginning (when)
public administration began [simple past] as an independent discipline.
Exercises for correcting inconsistent tense errors in actual student writ-ing can be highly productive and useful for practice with conventionalized uses of tense in academic written discourse in English
Progressive Aspects with Nonprogressive Verbs
A common type of errors with the usage of progressive tenses occurs when L2 writers employ nonprogressive verbs For example,
This essay is concerning the studies that have shown a sharp decline in the number
of recycling plants in the New York area and other U.S cities Those people who listen
Trang 3to the news are hearing about the high cost of recycling that makes it too expensive for
the industry to continue collecting metal and paper The news quote recycling plant
owners and operators who are depending on recycling for their jobs and who are com-plaining that there is simply not enough material to recycle for them to earn a living
and that operating too many plants is costing too much So, the plant owners propose
to close down some of their collection centers and reduce recycling However, the plant
owners and news media are dealing with this problem totally incorrectly They need to
educate the public to recycle more instead of closing down plants that will lead to the
public recycling less (Extracted from a student paper on how to educate the
public on recycling.)
The progressive tenses are exceptionally rare with verbs such as concern, hear, depend, and cost Thus, their use of nonprogressive verbs in
progres-sive tenses needs to be avoided, and simple tenses can be used instead However, in real contexts the issue may seem to be more complex than just simply changing the aspect of the nonprogressive verbs because other
verbs, such as complain and deal found in the same context, are perfectly ac-ceptable in the progressive form: are complaining and are dealing.
Two points are important to remember:
• Progressive verbs seldom occur in academic writing
• A number of important academic verbs are not used in the progres-sive aspect, and these verbs need to be learned
Thus, in academic writing, it may be best to avoid progressive tenses
THE ACTIVE VOICE AND THE PASSIVE VOICE
IN ACADEMIC WRITING
The form and grammatical derivation of passive constructions can be found
in all ESL grammar books For example:
The student bought the book -> The book was bought by the student.
John helped the boy -> The boy was helped by John
Because passive derivations are highly regular in their form, L2 learners generally quickly figure out how to convert active constructions into passive ones Then when it comes to fill in the blank exercises on sentence convert-ing, learners fill in all the blanks, and their learning of how to use the pas-sive voice is thus completed
Unfortunately, as is often the case with other English structures, the uses
of passives in real academic writing are far more complex than doing exer-cises in an ESL grammar textbook or filling in the blanks
Trang 4TEACHING VERB TENSES AND VOICE 161
The Uses and Functions of Passives in Academic Writing
The uses of the passive voice are extraordinarily common in academic writ-ing, and to a large extent the prevalence of passive voice is determined by academic discourse conventions (Biber, 1988; Myers, 1989; Poole, 1991; Swales, 1990a) The use of passive voice in formal writing has a number of
important textual functions One of these is to project an academic
indi-rectness, detachment, and objectivity in what Johns (1997) called "the
au-thor-evacuated prose" considered to be requisite in Western scientific tradition, and particularly so in natural sciences and engineering However,
in reaction to the conventionalized use of passive in rigidly structured aca-demic discourse in the United States, much writing instruction and many composition texts discourage the use of the passive voice except on rare oc-casions (Hacker, 1994, 2000; Kennedy et al., 2002; Lunsford & Connors, 1997; Lunsford & Ruszkiewicz, 2001)
In addition to creating an impression of detachment and objectivity, a more sophisticated function of the passive voice is to develop cohesive text
by organizing information in sentences along the known/old-to-new/impor-tant pattern in sentences For example:
The population problem is most pronounced in Third World nations The pop-ulation of the African continent exceeds 650 million (Adapted from
Thompson & Hickey, 2002)
In the 1930s and 1940, live music was generally considered superior to re-corded music Early disk jockeys made a significant contribution to change the public opinion.
The second strategy, known originally as the "spectacular," is today recognized
by a more modest term, the "television special "At NBC, Weaver bought special programs, like Laurence Olivier's filmed version of Richard III (Adapted
from Campbell et al., 2001)
In these examples, the passive voice constructions shift the new/impor-tant idea to the end of the sentence and thus help create lexical and seman-tic cohesive chain by connecting the end of the first sentence to the beginning to the next (see chap 11 for more information on cohesion) There are probably few constructions in writing and writing instruction that have been subject to as much debate and controversy as the use of pas-sive voice The opponents claim that active voice is more emphatic, vigor-ous, and clear than passive; that in active the doer of the action is placed in the sentence subject position; and that "active verbs are usually more effec-tive because they are simpler and more direct" (Hacker, 2000, p 241) All these evaluations are undoubtedly true However, based on the corpus
Trang 5anal-yses of academic prose, it appears that in real academic writing discourse, outside of the teaching of composition, passive voice is ubiquitous and re-mains a prevalent feature of academic text in various disciplines (Biber, 1988; Hyland, 1998; Johns, 1997; Swales, 1990a)
A commonsense recommendation is provided in the writing guide spe-cifically geared toward efficiency and clarity in writing (Williams, 2002, pp
41 and 43; see also chap 11 on cohesion)
"The uses of the passive voice should not be avoided merely based
on a general principle because they can be highly useful in many
con-texts The important use of the passive is that it allows the sentence to
focus on what is done rather than who does it and that it can be of
great value in developing cohesive text, by means of shifting the most
important and new information to the end of the sentence."
To put it simply, if the passive works better than the active in a
par-ticular context and for a parpar-ticular discourse purpose, then use it; if
not, then don't
The Contexts and Uses of the Active Versus the Passive Voice in English
Several studies of the uses of passive constructions in English have shown that the passive voice is very difficult for L2 learners to use appropriately because, generally speaking, many passive structures are lexicalized (Atkinson, 1991; Owen, 1993) That is, many passive constructions and specific contextual uses are idiomatic and cannot be structurally derived in some cases
However, it may be practically impossible to avoid using the passive voice
in academic writing: 25% of all sentence predicate verbs are employed in the passive (Biber et al., 1999) However, analyses of L2 academic texts has shown that compared with NS first-year university students, NNS writers even at advanced levels of proficiency do not use passive structures nearly as frequently (Hinkel, 2002a) (As a side note, it should be mentioned that
get-passives, such as get confused/finished/married, are extremely rare and
oc-cur only in conversation, and even then they seem to be highly infrequent.) For L2 writers, another important complication arises with regard to learning to use passive constructions in English Passive-like structures exist
in many languages, such as Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Russian However, also in many languages the doer of the action expressed by the verb must be a person or an animal (i.e., some type of living being that is ac-tually enabled to perform the action; Hinkel, 2002d; Master, 1991) In such
languages it would be correct to say, The man writes well, but incorrect to use a subject that is not capable of acting on its own (e.g., The pencil writes well).
The problem with such structures is further compounded by the fact that in-struments and abstract concepts as subjects (rather than alive beings) of
ac-tive verbs are highly common in academic writing (e.g., the chapter discusses/
Trang 6TEACHING VERB TENSES AND VOICE 163
reviews/presents, the program/machine runs, the factory produces, the office develops, the process begins, the forecast compares').
For L2 writers, a key issue with these constructions is to realize that
in English it does not really matter whether the subject of the active
verb is alive or not, or whether it has the capacity to perform the
ac-tion expressed by the verb Thus, all such structures and sentences are
grammatical no matter whether the subject of the active verb actually
and effectively performs the action
In addition, a small number of verbs are never used in the passive voice and are always encountered in the active These verbs need to be learned be-cause verbs with similar meanings exist in other languages, in which they can
be and often are used in the passive voice (e.g., Spanish) Hence, L2 writers need to be particularly careful when employing these verbs in their text
Verbs That Are Always (or Almost Always) Used in the Active Voice 3
appear* consist happen last resemble stay
arrive come fall occur rest wait
belong die lack remain seem
*The verbs in bold are always used in the active voice.
(Adapted from Biber et al, 1999; Swales & Peak, 1994)
Transitive Verbs, Direct Objects, and Agents
In teaching it is important to emphasize that only transitive verbs (those that require direct objects) can be used in the passive voice (see chap 3 for more information) The reason that only the structures with transitive verbs can be converted from active to passive is that only the direct object can be moved to make it the subject of the passive verb:
Managers considered [past tense] the price ->
The price was [past tense] considered (by managers)
In this construction, the direct object "jumps" to the subject position, the verb tense stays the same, the main verb is used in the past participle form
(e.g., written, gone, shown, considered), and the subject of the active verbs
3Linking verbs, such as appear, become, remain, and seem, cannot be used in passive voice
be-cause they are not (and cannot be) transitive.
Trang 7moves to the back of the sentence and into the fry-phrase In passive
con-structions, the nouns and noun phrases in the fry-phrase are called agents (and the entire phrase is called the agentivephrase).
In English passive construction, all agentive phrases are optional
In fact some of them can be downright incorrect
A quick check to see whether a verb can be used in passive is to place it in
a structure with a direct object:
report -> The book/article/xxx reports the finding If the verb can be used
with a direct object, the verb can be converted into passive The verb
report can be used in passive: The finding is reported (*by the book/article) hold -> xxx holds the book ->• passive constructions are possible ->• The book
is held (by xxx).
appear —> *The book appeared the page -> passive constructions are not
possible
last ->• The rain lasted (two hours) -> passive constructions are not
possi-ble because two hours is adverbial of time and not a direct object (see
chap 3 for techniques to identify direct objects)
Analyses of written academic texts have demonstrated that fry-phrases oc-cur infrequently, and the presence of a fry-phrase depends on whether it is needed for cohesion and the continuity of new information from one
sen-tence to the next by means of cohesive chains (e.g., Most consumer goods are
sold fry retailers Many in the retail trade industry have a size standard of 3.5 million
in average annual receipts') In other contexts, however, the fry-phrase is
usu-ally omitted
In such contexts where the agent is unknown, unimportant to the dis-cussion, or is easily understood from the context, the fry-phrase needs to
be omitted:
(1) ?Thefuel injector was designed by us to show it at the Engineering Senior Fair.
(2) ? We were told by someone that a company in Everett has a similar fuel injector.
(3) ?When their original designed was developed by them, they had to re-do it
be-cause at first the injector did not work, but the one developed by us worked from the start.
(All examples are from a student assignment in engineering.)
Trang 8TEACHING VERB TENSES AND VOICE 165
In (1), the fry-phrase can be understood from the context of a written group assignment; in (2), the writers did not know or did not care to men-tion the agent, and the sentence can easily do without the by-phrase In (3),
both fry-phrases—the by them and by us—are unnecessary because the agent
in each phrase can be understood from the context
Avast majority of passive sentences in formal academic writing do
not include the by-phrase.
In summary, L2 writers encounter a number of difficulties with appropri-ate uses of passive constructions in English Some have to do with various complexities in the meanings and uses of passives and others with the influ-ence of the first language grammar on the learners' uses of passive in Eng-lish when it is learned as a second language However, due to the prevalence
of the passive voice in academic writing in English, L2 writers need to learn
to employ passive constructions correctly
Several important considerations must be taken into account in
instruction on the passive voice in academic writing
• The greatest difference between active and passive constructions is stylistic, and in English passives have no additional meanings
com-pared with those of active structures
• Many passive constructions in English are idiomatic, and these need to be learned
• In English sentences, instruments and abstract concepts can be subject of active verbs even when the sentence subject does not
ac-tually perform the activity expressed by the verb For this reason,
for example, such structures as the book fell, the door is sliding, or the
newspaper arrives late every time are perfectly grammatical.
• Only transitive verbs that require direct objects can be used in the passive voice
• The fry-phrase is always optional in English sentences, and it is rarely used in academic writing
Working With Passive Constructions
In light of the many complexities associated with the contextual uses of the passive voice in English, one of the easier techniques that L2 writers can rely
on with great effect is to select verbs that almost always occur in passive and learn and practice using them
Trang 9The Most Common Passive Verbs in Academic Writing (in declining order)
For all verbs: be (is/are/was/were) + the Past Participle Form of the Main Verb (as listed)
made seen found considered
(Lists of common academic passive verbs here and elsewhere are adopted from the research of Biber etal., 1999; Nation, 1990, 2001; Swales
& Feak, 1994.)
These especially common passive verbs are usually familiar to L2 writers
at intermediate and higher levels of proficiency simply because they are en-countered in most academic reading and other types of textbooks For this reason, the practice with common passives can be combined with other verb constructions, such as modal verbs or infinitive complements (see also
chaps 3 and 12; e.g., can/may be found, is considered to be, or was shown to be; see
additional suggestions for teaching at the end of this chapter).
In addition to these highly common verbs, other important academic verbs include a large number of those noted in chapter 8 Some of these verbs are often accompanied by relatively fixed prepositions, which can be also learned and practiced in contexts.
Other Academic Verbs Predominantly Used in the Passive Voice
For all verbs: be (is/are/was/were) + the Past Participle Form of the Main Verb (as listed)
achieved
aligned (with)
applied
approved
asked
associated (with)
attributed (to)
based (on)
born
brought
calculated
called
carried
chosen
classified (as)
compared
composed (of)
coupled (with)
situated
deemed defined derived described designed determined discussed distributed documented drawn entitled (to) estimated examined expected explained expressed extracted flattened subjected (to)
formed given grouped (with/by) held
identified illustrated inclined intended introducted involved kept known labeled left limited (to) linked (to/with) located (at/in) lost
transferred
measured needed noted observed obtained performed plotted positioned prepared presented recognized regarded related (to) replaced reported represented required said viewed
Trang 10TEACHING VERB TENSES AND VOICE 167
stored thought treated
studied told understood
Typical Problems With Passives
Verb Forms Many, many errors with passive constructions have to do with
verb forms:
1 *The articles on the sociology of crime was write/wrote by John Smith.
2 *Psychology studies were conduct at Harvard University.
It is important to emphasize that the past participle form of the verb is re-quired in passive constructions following fo-verbs Many L2 writers—even those who are highly advanced—do not attribute sufficient importance to the distinctions between the past-tense and past-participle forms of irregu-lar verbs, and both types of forms need to be learned
Other similar types of problems occur simply because even at the college level L2 writers have not learned the three basic forms of irregular verbs
3 *Cheaters are usually catched by their professors.
When such ugly constructions are encountered in academic assignments and term papers, they usually prove to be highly embarrassing regardless of whether L2 writers are actually embarrassed by them
Learning the forms of irregular verbs is one of the basic essentials in university-level studies, similar to learning the multiplication table to
be able to do such basic math operations as counting the change due
Intransitive Verbs in Passive Constructions A very common type of error
includes perfectly correct passive structures with verbs that can never be used in the passive:
4 *This problem was happened in my country.
5 *The change in climate was occurred in coastal areas.
As mentioned earlier, only transitive verbs (those that require direct
ob-jects) can be used in passive Hence, L2 writers must learn the verbs that never occur in the passive (see the list earlier in this chapter)
Agentive (Who Does It) and Instrumental (by Means of) By-Phrases.
These types of errors are encountered occasionally and may be worth men-tioning only when necessary: