The Passive Voice
Using an altered sentence structure, we can express the result of an action. Here, the focus of the sentence is not on the noun doing the action, but on a noun affected by the action (a noun that would otherwise be an object of an active sentence).
What to Expect
Most sentences are spoken or written in ‘Active’ voice; they focus on a subject noun that does the action or has a state. Sometimes it’s better for the focus of a sentence to be a passive noun. An object noun of a sentence in Active voice can take the lead of a corresponding sentence in ‘Passive’ voice, which almost looks like the sentence is backward.
The featured method is taking 4 steps to turn an Active sentence into a Passive one.
Prerequisites
Learners should already be familiar with the following:
Parts of Speech, namely nouns and verbs. Nouns are people, places, things, ideas, and activities. Verbs are actions or states.
Subjects are ‘active’ nouns that do the verbs (or have states). Objects are ‘passive’ nouns. Direct Objects, which are featured in this video, are acted upon by the verb.
Forms of To Be, which is used as an auxiliary verb for Passive Voice.
- ‘am’/’is’/’are’ for present
- ‘was’/’were’ for past
- ‘be’ after modals
- ‘being’ for progressive
- ‘been’ for perfect
The Passive Participle Form, which Insights refers to as ‘V3’. Regular verbs add ‘-ed’ to the end to create the past participle form. Irregular verbs have ‘-en’ endings or different changes. Students should have learned this form – also called the Perfect Participle form – when they studied Perfect tenses.
Proficiency Level
Students at a B1 level are expected to be familiar with Passive Voice. They’ll likely start learning it at Pre-Intermediate level (or 3rd out of 6).*
*actual starting level varies from one course-book series to the next
The 4 Steps
1. put the passive noun before the verb
2. a) put “by” + the active noun after the verb
b) throw the active noun away
3. add to be before the main verb
4. change the main verb into the past participle form
Bonus Notes
Check out our interactive list of Irregular Verbs to see Passive Participle forms that don’t simply take the conventional -ed ending. Sort or filter this list in order to group irregular verbs together according to how they change from their base form to their Passive Participle form.
Practice Activity
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