One way to test for active/passive is to try to make a sentence 
passive, keeping the verb (if students can find it) constant:

"The receptionist received a thump on the head from the disgruntled 
guest."
"A thump on the head was received by the receptionist from the 
disgruntled guest."

The problem here, of course, is that the students will want to use 
"thump" as the verb.

> “The guests were told about the hotel facilities by the receptionist.”

"The hotel facilities were told about by the guests by the 
receptionist" is nonsense, but attempting this version of the sentence 
would be difficult for students just learning grammar.

As to "BE" + past participle, the issue of passive vs. adjectival 
readings come up:

The window was broken.
The 49ers fans were disappointed.

Explanations from meaning are tricky in a lot of cases. If students 
have trouble with basic concepts like auxiliary verbs and past 
participles, they'll have trouble identifying more than just passive 
sentences -- also things like these predicative sentences, and the 
perfect tense/aspects.

A few interesting facts about passive sentences:

- The vast majority of passive sentences in actual texts do not have 
"by" phrases, which will make them difficult to recognize.
- Though stylists inveigh against passives, there are good text-level 
reasons for using them: when the "undergoer" or "patient" of an action 
is the topic of a text, the most natural choices for sentences in the 
text are passives with that undergoer as subject.

To get an idea of what passive is used for, it's a  good idea to look 
at examples from real texts like newspapers, and talk about why a 
passive is used: i. who did the action is unknown or unimportant ("a 
bike was stolen"; "the store has been boarded up", "historic theater to 
be torn down"); ii. to deliberately hide or  background the doer of the 
action (very common in statements dealing with scandals: "mistakes were 
made"; "the documents were shredded"; "the  e-mails were deleted"). I 
have a fascinating handout from a conference talk with examples from a 
date-rape case in which passives were used to obscure who was doing 
what, and whether the actions were mutual or consensual, along the 
lines of 'what happened after her shirt was taken off'?

Teaching about active/passive is a good example of how taking sentences 
out of context makes grammar more difficult (and less interesting) than 
it needs to be. The role of subject as topic maintainer, and the 
various means by which a writer/speaker foregrounds and backgrounds 
participants in an action help students see grammar in action. They 
begin to grasp that it is a way of organizing meaning rather than just 
walking on eggs when they write their composition.

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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