Passive Verb Forms

Students at LSE often ask us to help them understand passive verb forms. Many learners get frustrated by passives in English. Some students don't even believe they are used by English people! Of course, they are very common, and very useful. This blog post should help you to understand how and why passive verb forms are used. There is a task at the end of the blog post, which will be answered in my next blog post. If you have questions about passive forms, please leave a comment below!

Why is the passive difficult to understand and use?

In my opinion, there are a few difficult things for students to deal with when studying the passive:

1) The complicated form – it is hard to manipulate sentences using the passive in different tenses and after modal verbs. This is because of all the different auxiliary verbs and past participles used to make passive structures.

2) Understanding how and why the passive is used. Many students say they know how to construct passive sentences, but don’t know when they should use them.

3) The pronunciation of passive forms – it can be difficult to hear all the little words used when native speakers use passive forms. Also, it’s difficult to pronounce them correctly if you’re not a native speaker.

What's the difference between active and passive forms?

To understand passive forms, we need to compare them to active forms.

Active sentences are in this structure:

SUBJECT/AGENT – VERB – OBJECT

E.g. Michael Jackson – wrote – this song

The subject is the agent (the thing that ‘does’ the verb)

The agent is included because it is important, or is the topic of the sentence (e.g. if the question is “who wrote this song?” it is important to say “Michael Jackson wrote it”)

But sometimes it is better to order the sentence in a different way. Like this passive sentence:

SUBJECT – VERB - (PREPOSITION + OBJECT/AGENT)

E.g. The song – was written – (by Michael Jackson)

What is the form of passive structures?

The basic form is: be + past participle

The auxiliary verb be can come in many forms, eg. being, been, was, were, am, are, is

Past participles are the 3rd form of a verb. E.g. eat - ate - eaten. Past participles are sometimes difficult to remember.

The agent (the one who 'does' the action of the verb) is often not included.

If the agent is included, you have to use a preposition (by).

Why is the passive used?

They are used a lot, and they are useful. But, why? and how?

Here’s a list of reasons why the passive is used:

• The agent is unknown (The diamond was stolen at midnight last night - at the moment, we don't know who the thief is)
• The agent is not important (The diamond had been valued at over £1o million it's not important who valued the diamond, we can assume it was an expert)
• The agent is obvious (“The thief was arrested” -obviously it was the police because they usually do that)
• The action (the verb) is more important than the agent (the one who did it) “The door had been smashed, the cabinet was broken into and a guard was killed”
• The diamond is the topic of the sentence or story, so it is put at the beginning of the sentence.

Real Examples: BBC News Report

Read the following news story about Michael Jackson’s death (adapted from a BBC News story, linked here)http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8119993.stm.

Find examples of the passive in the text. There should be 10. Think about these things:

1. Which tenses and verb forms are used? (e.g. present simple passive, past simple passive, passive infinitive)

2. Why has the passive been used in each case?

I will give you the answers to this task in my next blog post.

Pop star Michael Jackson has died in Los Angeles, aged 50.

Paramedics were called to the singer’s Beverly Hills home at about midday on Thursday after he stopped breathing.

He was pronounced dead two hours later at the UCLA medical centre.

Jackson, who had a history of health problems, had been due to perform a series of comeback concerts in the UK, beginning on 13 July. He is believed to have suffered a cardiac arrest.

Speaking on behalf of the Jackson family, Michael’s brother Jermaine said doctors had tried to resuscitate the star for more than an hour without success.

Jackson’s body was flown from UCLA to the LA County Coroner’s office, where a post-mortem was carried out. The results have not yet been published.

Concerns over Michael’s health were raised last month when four of Jackson’s planned comeback concerts were postponed, but organisers insisted the dates had been moved due to the difficulty of organising the show.

Some words and expressions in the story are defined below.

Paramedics – Doctors who drive ambulances

Beverly Hills – An area in California where lots of famous people live

Suffer a cardiac arrest – to have a heart attack

To be due to do something – to be arranged to happen. It is going to happen because it is planned

To resuscitate someone – to bring someone to life – using electricity, or breathing or pumping the chest

A post-mortem – a medical examination of a body after it has died

Using Podcasts to Learn English (Part 1)

The internet has changed the world. We now live in an instantly connected global society. As long as you have access to an online computer, you can find out about events almost as soon as they happen. Take the sad story of the death of Michael Jackson as an example. Within seconds of the event, millions of people all around the world knew what had happened: The King of Pop had died.

It’s not all sad news stories though. The internet can be a really useful tool to help you learn English, and there are lots of ways to do this. You can read blogs, like this one. People are blogging all the time, about lots of topics. If you like, you can blog about your own life too. As well as that, you can use social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to try and make friends and chat with other people around the world. You can use Twitter, in order to keep up with the latest conversation topics, follow interesting people, tweet about yourself and read other people’s tweets. You can also use YouTube to watch videos on almost any topic in English, or to upload your own videos for the world to see.

In my opinion, podcasts are one of the best ways to use the internet to improve your English. There are lots of podcasts on the internet and almost all of them are free. But, which are the best ones out there, and more importantly what actually is a podcast?

This is part 1 of a series of blog posts I’m going to write about podcasts. In this series, I’ll explain what podcasts are, how to listen to them and how to use them to improve your English. I’ll also recommend some good podcasts that you can find on the internet and can download for free.

So, watch this space for more blog posts about podcasts in the near future. For now though, have a look at the definitions of some of the useful ‘internet vocabulary’ I have used in this blog post, and feel free to write a comment or ask a question if you want to.

Luke.

podcast - n (C) an audio programme which you can listen to on the internet, or download and listen to on your computer or mp3 player. 'Pod' comes from the word 'iPod' and 'cast' comes from the word 'broadcast'. So, a podcast is like a broadcast (e.g. a radio show) on your iPod.

online - adj connected to the internet. The opposite is offline. E.g. my computer is offline at the moment because I don't have an internet connection at home.

blog - n (C) a website on which someone can regularly write posts, comments, stories, reports, diary entries, etc. Blogs are regularly updated. Blog is short for web-log.

blog - v to write on a blog. E.g. "I'm just blogging about how to use the internet to learn English".

blog post - n (C) an article, story, report, etc which has been written on a blog, by an author of the blog

social networking site - n (C) a website which people use to make friends, chat to people and share music & video, and make social arrangements

to chat - v this has two meanings. The most common meaning is to have an informal conversation with someone (it could be face to face or on the telephone), e.g. "I was just chatting with your Mum about what you want for your birthday...". The second meaning is newer than the first, and it means to have a text conversation with someone on the internet, using a messaging service like MSN Messenger or in an internet chat room.

chat - n (C) an informal spoken conversation, or a text conversation on the internet. E.g. "I had a chat with Mum about what you wanted for your birthday..."

to keep up with something - phrasal verb to stay up-to-date with something. E.g. "I like to keep up with the latest film reviews by using the BBC's film review website" or "I use Facebook to keep up with what my friends are doing"

tweet - n (C) a status update or comment which has been written on the website Twitter. It's a new word which is used for updates written on Twitter only. E.g. "Follow our tweets by visiting the LSE Twitter page"

tweet - v to write a status update or comment on Twitter. E.g. "The London School of English tweets about something every day"

upload - v to put an audio file, video file or photograph onto the internet from your computer. E.g. "Click here to upload your profile picture" or "You can't upload videos onto YouTube which are longer than 10 minutes"

download - v (and a noun sometimes) to take an audio file, video file or photograph from the internet and save it on your computer. E.g. "I downloaded Skype last night, so we can use it to chat from now on" or "Click here to download the mp3"

watch this space - fixed expression this is a common expression that people use to say a development is coming so pay attention to this. it is often used in newspapers, on TV and on websites. E.g. "Watch this space for news of the latest iPhone release"