A Survey of the Present Situation and Problem Analysis of College English Writing—From the Perspective of Passive Voice

Passive voice is one of the most important and difficult grammatical items both in English and in Chinese. Because of the great differences between passive voices in English and in Chinese, Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners undoubtedly run into a lot of difficulties during the time of learning English passive voice. Different from the previous research, this thesis is a corpus-based study focusing on passive errors made by Chinese EFL learners, especially under-used passive errors, over-used passive errors and malformed passive errors. Based on the three important theories in language acquisition: contrastive analysis, interlanguage analysis and error analysis, this thesis will analyze the data acquired from the corpus set up from one of the classes in one university in China. And the major reasons for these errors will be revealed in this research. The findings in this thesis are hoped to have some influence on English passive teaching.