Approaching the Passive in an Active Way (and actually enjoying it)

Syana Harizanova, Bulgaria

Syana Harizanova is a teacher of English and a teacher trainer. Based at New Bulgaria University in Sofia and trained with British Council Bulgaria, she has been involved in in-service and pre-service teacher training for over 15 years. Her most recent interests include developing thinking skills and promoting learner autonomy in primary students. She has always been fascinated with using chants, rhythmic refrains and poems in teaching English to learners of all ages. E-mail: syanaharizanova@yahoo.com

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Introduction
Background
Reflection
Procedure
Conclusion
References

Introduction

It was not easy to pick up an appropriate title for this article (and I am not sure I have come up with a good one either) as it is trying to address more than one thing related to ELT. Some of these are:

• teaching adults
• teaching the Passive
• using poetry in class.

The article is based on a classroom experience of mine which some time ago took me from a state of almost a total despair to that of a deep professional and personal satisfaction and which I thought worth sharing with other colleagues who might have found themselves in a similar situation.

Background

The group that threw me into such polar emotions consisted of a dozen adult learners - 75% female, average age 37. This clarification is necessary as I believe age and sex are factors that may strongly affect the learning and the general atmosphere in a group. As for their level, a placement test had diagnosed them as intermediate but, as it turned out later, the majority were pure pre-intermediate and two were more like elementary. (No comment on the reliability of the placement test!) The group was doing an intensive three-month course which meant English classes from 8:00 till 13:00 every day of the week!

It didn't take me long to realize that they were a lovely bunch of people – intelligent, sociable and open-minded. Luckily, they came to like each other pretty soon and by the end of the second week had developed a charming group spirit. The breaks were not enough for all the topics they were eager to discuss and all the experiences they had to share. So they (or should I say 'we' as I was also invited) often met after classes to catch up with all these.

The problem was that very little if any of this animation and talkativeness was to be seen in class. In fact, their behaviour and disposition during the lessons was very nearly the absolute opposite of what happened outside. To mention but a few of my worries:

• My students expected guidance from me at all times and refused to act on their own;
• Feeling quite comfortable with controlled language practice, they reacted strongly when invited to do a more challenging task;
• They were obviously not used to experimenting or playing with the language and were not ready to take risks with it;.
• The majority seemed to believe that correct grammar was the paved road to fluency;
• They all dreamed of being able to speak English freely but felt that this would not happen to them, at least not soon.

If I had to summarise, I would say their main problem was that they were seeing learning English as a hell of a serious job, which prevented them from feeling the real pleasure of it. To make things worse, the further we went with the course the more firmly they believed that everything was too complicated and too difficult to be learned, let alone on a three-month course. They often complained that they didn't feel they were making any progress, that now they were making more mistakes than before, that their memory failed them when it came to learning and remembering new vocabulary, and so on and so on. Their despair was growing visibly and some of them were on the verge of giving up completely.

Reflection

I could not allow this to happen so I started looking for ways of helping them overcome their fear of the language and their conviction that they were 'total failures' in English. I had already tried playing language games but had noticed that while this usually brought relaxation to the classroom and some students really enjoyed it, most of them (and especially the males) failed to see the direct link between playing and learning. To quote one of them, 'I have paid for the course to improve my English, not to play games!' So if the better half of the group believed that games were for pure entertainment and, when playing, felt guilty of wasting their precious 'learning' time, obviously there had to be found some other way of getting them out of their frustration and boosting their self-confidence as users of English.

I sat down to consider which of their personal characteristics and common features as learners might help me do this. To begin with, they were all mature, responsible and motivated to learn. Also, most of them had varied and rich life experience which, fortunately, they were ready to share with the others. They liked discussing things like human bahaviour and relationships, moral values, family values, success and its price, cultural identity, etc. As learners, they struck me as quite logical and analytical. They were trying to see language as a well-functioning system or a well-balanced structure. They were very good at organizing, classifying or categorizing words, patterns, ideas. (Classifying language games were among their favourites.) My students showed a marked preference for patterns. Also, they did not mind repetition in any form and, surprisingly, responded positively when asked to repeat things aloud together.

So it came to my mind then that perhaps it would be a good idea to turn to jazz chants or poetry and involve my students in creating some rhythmic patterns or simple rhymes of their own making use of the new English they were learning. For ideas, they would have to rely on their life experience and would be encouraged in their poems/ rhymes to reflect their own philosophy of life. The best part of it was that in this way they would be able to 'dress up' new vocabulary or difficult structures into memorable chunks that were meaningful to them personally.

I am not going to describe how I introduced the idea to the group and the careful planning it took me in order to suppress their initial suspicion. This would take more than a few pages. What I am going to do below is give an outline of a lesson which turned out a huge success with this group and which illustrates how poetry can be used to make learning the Passive Voice a most pleasurable experience.

Before that it might be appropriate to mention that the Bulgarian word for Passive (Voice) is stradatelen – a derivative from the verb stradam which means to suffer, to endure. As we were approaching the textbook unit that dealt with the Passive Voice the group started to talk half-jokingly half-seriously about the 'grave suffering' that was ahead. They would come to me and start asking 'Do you think we'll survive? We don't like to suffer. Can't we just skip this unit and get on with the next one?' I promised they would not suffer too much but then added that suffering did not have to be seen as a totally negative experience. In fact it might even lead to some very positive results, I said. And then I started implementing my Active-Passive plan.

Procedure

I have chosen to describe what we did in class in a series of numbered activities written in the imperative, which does not mean that, should you decide to try out some of the ideas suggested, you should stick to this particular chronological order.

1. Get the students for homework to revise the three forms of the irregular verbs they know and explain that knowing the third form of the verb is a crucial factor in "fighting" the Passive Voice. Tell them that they can help memorizing these by putting the verbs in groups according to the pattern of change they undergo, e.g. break-broke-broken, speak-spoke-spoken or buy-bought-bought, bring-brought-brought, etc.
2. In the next lesson check if they have done their job by asking them to give the three forms of whatever verb you say aloud. Warn them to be very careful as they will be hearing both regular and irregular verbs. Throughout this step you will be jotting down on the board all the correct past participles your students say back to you. For example, if you say 'choose' and somebody adds 'chose – chosen', you write the word 'chosen' on the board. It is much easier to prepare in advance a list of verbs in random order and read out from there rather than trying to remember which verbs you have already mentioned and which ones you still haven't. What is more, you should deliberately make a list of transitive verbs only as they will be in focus at a later stage of the lesson when dealing with the Passive Voice.
3. When your board is full of past participles, praise the students for the well done job. Leave the board behind you as it is and tell them they deserve a short break from verbs and participles. Say that they are going to participate in something which might be called a Feeling-and-Thinking game but do not give any further explanations yet. Their task at first is simply to listen.
4. Share with your students a personal situation in which you were not happy with the way things went. Then replay the situation to the class as you would have liked it to have gone. (The idea was borrowed from Headstrong, Tessa Woodword's Book of thinking frames for mental exercise.) Explain that you often do this in your head and you have found out it helps you feel better, stronger, wiser and generally more prepared for difficult situations in the future.
5. Tell the students to bring to mind a situation when things did not happen to their liking or satisfaction and to share these in pairs. Then ask them, in their pairs, to consider the unpleasant experiences in a new light, namely to think of the lessons they have learnt from them. (For these two steps you might consider allowing an occasional use of the mother tongue.) Discuss these 'lessons' in plenary.
6. Ask students if they have ever thought about the link between emotional pain and art. Elicit examples of pieces of art inspired by deep human suffering. Students could look for them in poetry, drama, music, fine arts, etc.
7. Announce that today they will be involved in creating a poem dedicated to the Great Sufferer which, not accidentally, will be written in the Passive voice. (For reasons I mentioned above, in Bulgarian it is very easy to make a connection between the idea of suffering and the Passive.) Calm them down by saying that they do not need any experience in writing poems in their own language and that they will be getting a lot of support on the way.
8. Turn your students' attention back to the board with the past participles and ask them to look for different ways of combining the words in pairs according to certain criteria, for example
   • past participles that rhyme (frozen – chosen, kissed – missed);
   • alliterative pairs of past participles (loved – left, forgiven – forgotten);
   • past participles that are similar in meaning (cheated – deceived) or that are opposite in meaning (lost – found);
   • past participle that sound similar (heard – hurt, loved – laughed).
   You can invite them to suggest other pairing criteria as well.
9. While you are giving the examples, draw circles around the corresponding participles on the board and join them together with a line to make the pairs stand out. Give the students some thinking time and then invite volunteers to the board to do the same with other participles. Encourage them to find a maximum number of interesting pairs.
10. Ask the students to use these pairs of participles to make pairs of sentences beginning with I've been …, for example 'I've been loved. I've been left' or 'I've been lost. I've been found.' They should write these down in their notebooks
11. Tell your students to combine the sentences in different ways in order to form a more or less rhythmic piece of text. This part of the task can be done individually but after that students will have to get together in groups and join efforts in arranging the lines in the best order to form a poem.
    
    As a result, you might expect to get something like this:
    
    I've been robbed.
    I've been mugged.
                     I've been beaten.
                     I've been bitten.
                                      I've been used.
                                      I've been abused.
                                                       I've been shocked.
                                                       I've been blocked.
                                                                        etc………
12. When the groups have finished, they compare their versions with the other group(s) and exchange comments. Then, if the whole group decides, they can produce a single poem made up by the most effective lines from the different poems. As a next step students are encouraged to make any changes where necessary to improve on the sense, the rhythm or the rhyme.

Further below you can read the poem which my group came up with as a result of a long and heated discussion and after a first, second and n-th editing:

I've been beaten
I've been hurt
I've been bitten
I've been cursed
I've been laughed at
I've been left
I've been shocked
                 And scared to death
I've been cheated
I've been robbed
I've been treated like a dog

Hmmm. Not very cheerful, is it? But strikingly powerful, I would say. Besides, do you remember what we said about learning from pain? Pain can make us stronger and wiser. So the group, enthused by the result of their joint efforts and enjoying a most unexpected effect of a passive structure decided to add a second part to the poem about the Great Sufferer. This second part was to convey the message 'Suffering can make you a winner'.

In class, we brainstormed how a person changes as a result of lessons learnt from unpleasant life experiences. The ideas were briefly noted down on the board and the students copied them in their notebooks so that they could consider them at home and think of a possible continuation of the poem. It was decided that, if possible, the lines should contain some passive. The other recommendation was to try and keep the rhythm.

Needless to say, it was far from easy to choose which of the numerous suggestions brought by my students over the next few days to include and how to combine them in a more or less smooth and logical way. Opinions differed. We would nearly come to an agreement on a final version and then somebody would suggest something even better. Ideas were exchanged. Minds were changed. Lines were rearranged. (Isn't this a sheer manifestation of passive voice poetry!) The most important thing, however, was that my students completely forgot about their

After a whole series of 'improvements' we decided on the following 18 lines to be added to the first part of 'The Great Sufferer':

But today I'm very different.
These are all things from the past.
I cannot even remember
when they happened to me last.

Now I'm different.
Yes, I'm DIFFERENT!
I'm not good
But I'm not used.
I'm not loved
But I'm not left.
I may not be heard sometimes
But I'm seldom hurt, my friends.
And my heart is never torn.
Yes, it's true, I am alone
But perhaps it's worth the pain
And perhaps it's worth the change
For the more you love, my dears,
The more often you burst in tears.

Conclusion

I don't know what you think of the poem but my students were so proud of it that they wanted to share it with as many people as possible. Somebody suggested that we printed it out in a large enough size and hung it outside our classroom for other groups to read and admire during the breaks. A girl offered to decorate the printout to make it more attractive. Somebody else said we could open a competition for the best Bulgarian translation of the poem and invite the other groups to join in. My colleagues, on the other hand, who had learned about the whole thing from me, said they would like to try out writing a passive voice poem with their own students and see how it worked. So eventually, a competition was opened among all groups for writing a poem 'made up' of passive structures. It was up to the teachers to decide how they would organize the writing process although I had shared with them my own idea.

Without going into details, let me just say that this competition turned out to be the Event of the course and was later described by many students as the most memorable experience in their lives as learners. I do believe that my students not only overcame their lack of confidence and not only learned to use a pattern they had found difficult in English, but they also developed a sense of the rhythm and melody of the language and this gave them an even greater satisfaction.
I realized once again that, regardless of the level you teach, there is a lot you can do with the help of poetry to make your students love and play with the language. And one more thing we should never forget. To quote Alan Maley and Sandra Moulding, 'personal feelings are as important in a foreign language as they are in our own language'. So if you manage to reach your students' hearts, you will be rewarded by an impressive warmth and responsiveness which is half the way to a successful teaching and learning.

References

Woodword T. (2006), Headstrong. A book of thinking frames for mental exercise, Tessa Woodword Publications.

Maley, A. and S. Moulding (1985), Poem into Poem, Cambridge University Press.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Secondary Teaching course at Pilgrims website.