Abstract:

The study deals with the passive that is not a simple order variation due its ability to reconstruct the clause. It serves the discourse functions of cohesion and contextual fit as well as weight distribution from the functional sentence perspective. Therefore, it seems to be important to encourage learners of English both to notice and understand when and why passive constructions are chosen and used. The reason for this approach is based on an assumption that passive constructions are similar in a variety of languages but they used differently and usually far less.

The aim of our study was to encourage students to search for the use of passive constructions across three registers: academic, news and fiction. In their master-degree programme, the students whose major is English were divided into three groups, each of them focusing on one of the mentioned registers. They were given approximately the same number of pages taken from authentic materials published in the 21st century in order to analyse them with the aim to focus on distribution of passive types across the particular register.

Despite the fact that there are a number of measurements and analyses of corpus findings, the use of the passive in English has changed, which seems to support the idea that future teachers of English need to become aware of a variety of passive constructions in order to be able to use them in appropriate contexts and thus influence future users of English positively.

Using discovery learning and learner-centred approaches, we wanted the students to discover particular aspects of passive constructions and their use in the discourse. The students were tasked to analyse both long and short passive constructions, focusing on their frequency, their syntactic positions and the discourse functions they serve in a particular register. Their findings will be analysed and discussed taking into account a number of grammarians’ approaches in order to cover the complexity of this grammatical complex structure.

Keywords:

Functional approaches, passive constructions, appropriate contexts, discourses.