Page 183 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

TEACHING VERB TENSES AND VOICE 169
sonably accurate context at least in terms of tenses. However, the contextualized uses of the active and passive voices present a number of problems for L2 writers, who need to become proficient with passive verb forms and meanings. Although the form of passive verbs can become easier to employ with some practice, the meanings and functions of the passive voice in sentences and broader contexts require a great deal of work from students and attention, effort, and knowledge from teachers.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
English tenses are often difficult for students to understand and use appro- priately. The simplest way to teach tenses is to start by separating tenses and aspects. There are three tenses in English: the past, the present, and the fu- ture. There are twoaspects: the progressive and the perfect.
In general terms, the simple present tense is very flexible, and its uses are highly conventionalized. For this reason the simple present can be em- ployed even in contexts where, logically speaking, the past tense should be used (e.g., citations from and references to earlier publications). The sim- ple past tense can be used in the specific contexts of historical and bio- graphical descriptions of specific people, events, and/or places such as case studies. The future tense is rarely used in academic writing—more com- monly, modal verbs (e.g., can, may) are used to express future expectation. Progressive tenses are rarely found in academic writing, and perfect tenses are employed only occasionally and mostly with a limited class of verbs.
The passive voice is common in academic writing, although some com- position books advise against its use. Students need to be taught judicious use of the passive voice—that only transitive verbs can be used in the passive voice, that the fry-phrase is optional and rarely used in academic writing, and that some passive constructions are idiomatic and must be learned in- dependently of general rules.
STRATEGIES AND TACTICS FOR TEACHING AND TEACHING ACTIVITIES
The following six exercises and practice assignments can help students with verb tenses and voice.
(1) Learning to Notice Typical Errors in the Verb Phrase and Articu- late the Reasons for the Errors
This exercise is similar to those found in many ESL grammar books. The primary benefit of this practice is that students need to explicitly indicate what the problems with the sentences are and devise a general rule to avoid making similar errors in their own writing. Students can work in pairs and
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