Kurdish EFL Learners’ Awareness of Passivization in English and Kurdish

Salih Ibrahim Ahmed

Abstract


Passivization is the grammatical process in which the structures of the whole sentence, and specifically the verb phrase, change. This process is one of the main syntactic needs in any academic writing. Therefore, any English learner needs to know enough about it by the end of undergraduate studies. This paper, being an empirical one, tests Kurdish learners’ awareness of the process by providing an instrument. The data and the scope of the study are sentences from English and Kurdish. A cohort of eightyeight senior students in the English departments in Iraqi Kurdistan universities were selected randomly to participate in the study. As for the Kurdish variety, the Central Kurdish has been chosen which is spoken in Erbil and Sulaymania. On this basis, the setting of the research incudes only the universities situated in this geographical area. A mixed method has been adopted in doing the paper. The aim of the study is to indicate and compare the learners’ awareness in passivizing and recognizing certain sentence structures in both languages. One of the main conclusions of the study is that there is a positive correlation between the EFL learners’ awareness in English and Central Kurdish (CK) in relation to passivization.

Full Text:

PDF

References


Ahmed, S. I. (2015). To-infinitive clauses in English: a generative

grammar analysis. In Journal of University of Raparin vol. 2 (3),

-28.

Ahmed, S. I. (2018). A generative study of possessive constructions

in English and Central Kurdish. Unpublished PhD Dissertation,

Department of English, Salahaddin University-Erbil.

Ahmed, S. I. (2020). On wh-elements in Central Kurdish: a minimalist

approach. In Zanko Journal for humanities vol. 24 (4), 273-284.

https://doi.org/10.21271/zjhs.24.4.17

Alvin, P. A. (2014). The passive voice in scientific writing: The current

norm in science journals. In Journal of Science Communication

(01), 1-16. http://jcom.sissa.it/

American Psychological Association (2020). Publication manual of the

American Psychological Association (7th ed.). Washington, DC:

Author.

Bakhshandeh, S. & Jafari, Kh. (2018). The effects of input

enhancement and explicit instruction on developing Iranian lower-

intermediate EFL learners’ explicit knowledge of passive voice. In

Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education, 3

(18), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-018-0060-4

Banks, D. (2017). The extent to which the passive voice is used in the

scientific journal article, 1985–2015. In Functional Linguistics,

(12), 1-17. https://10.1186/s40554-017-0045-5.

Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production.

Cognitive Psychology, 18(3), 355–387.

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(86)90004-6

Burton-Roberts, N. (2016). Analysing sentences: An introduction to

English syntax (4th ed.). London: Routledge.

Duklim, B. & Maneechote, S. (2021). Passive Voice Learning Problems

of the 1st Year Students of Rajamangala University of Technology

Srivijaya. In The Liberal Arts Journal, 4 (1), 145-166.

https://so02.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/lajournal

Ferreira, F. (2021). In defense of the passive voice. In American

Psychologist, 76(1), 145–153.

https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000620

Garraffa, M., Smart, F., & Obregón, M. (2021). Positive effects of

passive voice exposure on children’s passive production during a

classroom story-telling training. In Language Learning and

Development (17:3), 241-253.

https://10.1080/15475441.2021.1875830

Greenbaum, S. & Nelson, G. (2016). An introduction to English

grammar (4th ed.). London: Pearson Education Limited.

Hornsby, D. (2014). Linguistics: a complete introduction. London: The

McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Huddleston, R. & Pullum, G. K. (2005). A student's introduction to

English grammar. Cambridge: CUP.

Kim, K. & Kim, H. (2013). L1 Korean transfer in processing L2 English

passive sentences. In Selected Proceedings of the 2011 Second

Language Research Forum: Converging Theory and Practice, ed.

Erik Voss et al. Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 118-128.

Maulida, I. (2015). Improving students’ ability in using passive voice

of present progressive tense through contextual teaching and

learning. Unpublished thesis, faculty of tarbiya and teachers’

training Syarif Hidayatullah state Islamic university, Jakarta.

Minton, T. D. (2015). In defense of the passive voice in medical

writing. In The Keio Journal f Medicine, 64 (1), 1–10.

Sulaiman, M. B. & Muhammad, H. A. (2014). Passivization problems

in the performance of Kurdish EFL university students. In Anbar

University Journal of Language & Literature 13, 17-32.

Tallerman, M. (2015). Understanding syntax (4th ed.). New York:

Routledge.

Thompson, D., Ling, S. P., Myachykov, A., Ferreira, F., & Scheepers, C.

(2013). Patient-related constraints on get- and be-passive uses in

English: evidence from paraphrasing. In Frontiers in Psychology, 4

(848). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00848.

Thompson, D., Ferreira, F., & Scheepers, C. (2018). One step at a

time: representational overlap between active voice, be-passive,

and get-passive forms in English. Journal of Cognition, 1(1): 35,

–24. https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.36

Van Geyte, E. (2013). Writing: Learn to write better academic essays.

London: HarperCollins Publishers.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24042/ee-jtbi.v15i2.13612

License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

English Education: Jurnal Tadris Bahasa Inggris, UIN Raden Intan Lampung is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. pISSN: 2083-6003, eISSN: 2580-1449.