EFL TEACHERS' STRATEGIES FOR MINIMIZING NINTH GRADERS' ENGLISH PASSIVE VOICE ERRORS

Abstract

This research was conducted to investigate English teachers' strategies for minimizing ninth graders' errors in using English passive voice. The participants were four teachers who were teaching at a secondary school in a Vietnamese rural region. The research analyzed the qualitative data from four online teacher interviews which included nine questions. The research results showed that, regarding feedback strategies, most of the teachers preferred indirect feedback, including techniques such as encouraging self-correction and circling errors in homework for students to correct independently. Feedback timing varied, with some teachers addressing errors at the end of the lesson, while others provided immediate correction. In terms of language instruction, teacher participants proposed four major strategies: instruction in mother tongue, focus on forms, focus on meaning, and fun extra activities. Especially, focus on forms through grammar reinforcement was emphasized, meaning that the teachers highlighted the importance of regular and irregular participle verbs, tenses, and sentence analysis. Focus on meaning was also deemed essential to enable students to understand sentence meanings effectively, entailing the need for vocabulary improvement.