The most common approach in teaching passive voice, or, any kinds of grammar in Hong Kong primary classrooms is usually spoon-fed education that’s highly emphasised on memorization and drilling of exercises. According to the Behaviorist Theory, it is suggested that external stimuli can elicit an internal response which in turn can elicit an internal stimuli that lead to external responses. Imitation provides the learner with a collection of appropriate, productive responses.

 

Usually, in a normal Hong Kong primary classroom, when teachers teach passive voice, they would first stabilise the students’ knowledge of subject, verb and object distribution (S-V-O) in active voice before they start teaching passive voice. This is because Hong Kong primary school students’ first language is usually Cantonese and the syntax of speaking Cantonese is mostly in active voice, hence, students could therefore relate and could construct a basis for them to learn passive voice later on.

 

The Deductive Approach adopted in the Hong Kong primary classrooms has both strengths and weaknesses when it comes to ‘rule-driven learning’. This approach gets straight to the point and is fairly time-saving. Many rules could be simplified and quickly explained then obtained from examples. When primary students first learn syntax, passive voice to be specific, the exercises they work on usually involves swapping of word orders, the same as they do equations in mathematical class. This will allow more time for practice and application, which is beneficial for young learners. On the other hand, starting the lesson with a grammar presentation may be off-putting for some students, especially those who were young in age. They may not have sufficient grammatical terminology to comprehend the concepts involved. Lastly, Grammar explanation encourages a teacher-fronted, transmission-style classroom; teacher explanation is often at the expense of student involvement and interaction.

 

However, most Hong Kong primary teachers would only explain the ‘how’ when it comes to introducing passive voice and would rarely explain the ‘why’ or the situations which passive voice could be applied to since students do not use English in their daily communication and passive voice doesn’t have the cause to prove its utility in students daily conversations.

 

The reason that contributes to the following phenomenon because, grammar, in a lot of primary teachers’ mindset does not have much logic or reason to it, they usually believe ‘it’s just the way it is’ and even if there were reasons behind those grammatical rules, primary school students were too young at age to comprehend.