Present sentences like “It is made of steel” and “It is used to cut your nails” are usually students’ first contact with passive voice. Present Simple Passive therefore needs careful presentation to set students up for later work on other forms of passive voice, and practice that naturally uses just this one tense. This article gives some ideas.
What students need to know about Present Simple Passive
Present Simple (active) sentences like “They rob tourists” can be rearranged so that the “actor” who is doing the action is no longer the grammatical subject, as in “Tourists are robbed (by them)”. Passive voice is always “be + past participle”, with the tense of “be” being the same as the (name of the) tense in the normal active equivalent. This means Present Simple Passive needs the Present Simple of “be” with past participle, as in:
- I’m criticised
- You’re criticised
- She’s/ He’s/ It’s/ John’s criticised
- We’re criticised
- They’re/ Jane and John’re criticised
As well as retaining the name and tense of the active equivalent, each passive form also retains the meaning of the matching active version. “They criticise me” therefore has the normal Present Simple meaning of a repeated action, e.g. “They always criticise me”. Thus, Present Simple Passive also goes with the same kinds of time expressions as Present Simple more generally, such as frequency expressions (“The bins are emptied twice a week”) and times (“The milk is delivered before six a.m.”).
As with all passive voice forms, the actor can be put at the end with “by” but is often left out, as in “Grapes are grown in Sussex (by farmers)”.
As “be” is the auxiliary verb in Present Simple Passive, it changes position in questions, takes the negative form, and is used in short answers, as in:
- We aren’t told until the day before.
- Where is it made?
- Is it grown near here? Yes, it is./ No, it isn’t.
This makes the questions, negative and short answers unlike Present Simple Active, which has no auxiliary verb and so needs “do/ does” in the places above (“They don’t tell us”, etc). In fact, the forms above are more like Present Continuous, which has a different meaning but the same auxiliary verb.
Lessons should be designed so that students get to use and check their understanding of typical verbs with Present Simple Passive like “used” and “grown”. “It is said that…” and “It is thought that…” are common structures with this grammar. However, they are slightly different, as “it” has no meaning, and these forms are used to talk about quite academic topics which are generally too heavy for students studying Present Simple Passive for the first time. The activities below are therefore designed to avoid “It is said/ thought that…”.
Typical student problems with Present Simple Passive
Students studying this tense for the first time can often still have problems recognising and producing contractions, instead expecting and producing sentences like “You ARE told what to do every morning”. It is worth practising using the contractions, mainly to help with comprehension, but also because using the wrong form and too much stress like this example can make it seem like you are emphasising very strongly, for example to disagree with what someone else says or thinks (“We aren’t told what to do” “You ARE told what to do”, etc).
Students tend to over use Present Simple in sentences like “I do it yesterday/ tomorrow”. Even students who have stopped overusing Present Simple might come across the same problem again when they only have Present Simple Passive as an option when they really want to say “It’s being delivered”, “It has been ordered”, “I’ll be praised”, etc. This is best avoided by carefully choosing activities like those below which only need Present Simple, especially avoiding situations where they might want to talk about history with “It was invented…” etc. If this confusion does come up, it is often worth correcting, if only once. This can be done by asking them to convert “I am shocked by the weather yesterday X” into Present Simple (“The weather shock me yesterday” X) to show how obviously wrong it is.
Depending on the activities that you give them, students often try to make Present Simple Passive sentences with verbs which are never passive in English like “It is happened X” and “It is appeared X”. These are natural in some other languages, but in English they are quite obviously not “by someone” and cannot be transformed into a Present Simple Active sentence in the normal way. They are therefore always “It happens because of…”, “It appears every spring”, etc.
Students studying this point for the first time will probably have recently done lots of work with adding “do”, “does” and maybe “did” to make questions, negatives and short answers. It is therefore fairly common for them to come up with “Does it is sold in department stores? X”, “It doesn’t eaten with custard X”, etc.
This tense and many of the ideas for it in this article naturally bring up quite a lot of “made by + the actor” vs “made from/ of + the material” as in “made by Moet” vs “made of/ from grapes”. It can also bring up lots of irregular past participles like “grown” and “sold”.
How to present Present Simple Passive
Perhaps the most natural and useful use of Present Simple Passive is to describe things which the speaker and/ or the listener don’t know the name for. For EFL students, the two most realistic versions of this are describing things they don’t know the English name for but might need to talk about while travelling etc (tweezers, plug adaptors, etc), and explaining things in their own culture that people from other countries won’t know the name of (local festivals, foods, clothing, etc). ESP students might also have do something similar with things which people without their specialist knowledge such as their customers might not understand.
Describing things they don’t know the English name for is quite common in textbooks, or can be prepared with pictures of sticky plasters, Post It notes, etc and descriptions to match to them, perhaps after students attempt to describe them with their own words first. Students can then analyse the examples to find the structures and meanings above, before describing the same things through their knowledge and memory, and finally doing the same with other similar objects.
If you have students from just one country, the same steps can be done with your choice of the things they are most likely to have to explain to people from other countries and some descriptions you have made up or found such as “It is made from cabbage and flour. It’s a kind of savoury pancake” for the Japanese dish “okonomiyaki”.
There is also an alternative which is common in textbooks but is less useful for everyday communication, namely trivia questions about where the most wine is drunk, where the most saffron is grown, etc. This is rarely as stimulating as it sounds, can embarrass students with little general knowledge, and/ or can brings question forms into class earlier than you might like. However, you can make the general knowledge bit easier, add more useful language analysis and lead up better to the presentation stage. This can be done by splitting each trivia statement up into two and mixing up the second halves in a way that means students can match the beginnings and ending both by general knowledge and just be language knowledge. For example, students can make sure that they don’t put “is + are found X” and think about collocations like “Tennis is + played on a court” but “Judo bouts + are fought on in a dojo”.
Some of the practice activities below can also be done before the presentation stage.
How to practise Present Simple Passive
Present Simple Passive split sentences pairwork
The split sentences mentioned above can be turned into a communicative activity by putting the sentence starters on a Student A worksheet and the mixed endings on a Student B worksheet. Then ask students to match the two halves and write the missing part in the right place, alll without showing their worksheets to each other.
Present Simple Passive dominoes
The split sentences described above can also be turned into dominoes that have the ending of one sentence on the left and the beginning of another on each card (e.g. “grown in Sri Lanka./ The most coffee”). After working together to put all the domino cards into one big circle, students can deal out the cards to play dominoes with (but with only possible one match for each card, unlike real dominoes).
Present Simple Passive definitions guessing game
Defining cultural and useful things as explained above can also be turned into a practice game. A student chooses a card saying “Songkhram”, with a picture of a corkscrew, etc without showing it to anyone else, and describes it until someone can pick out which item from a list or from a collection of pictures is being described.
Present Simple Passive roleplays
Using this tense to describe things can also be put into roleplay situations like:
- in a bar or restaurant with a foreign guest who has never been to your country before
- trying to find which local food or cultural attraction a foreign guest would most enjoy
- on the phone to someone who is shopping in a DIY shop but who knows nothing about DIY
- explaining modern life to someone who has come through a time machine, to an alien, to someone who has been in a coma for a long time, to someone who has been on a desert island for a long time, etc
Present Simple Passive definitions challenge
Students choose an object like a Swiss army knife and take turns making true sentences like “It is made in Switzerland” and “It is used to open canned food”, continuing until someone gives up or says something that is untrue.
Present Simple Passive definitions board game
This is like the Definitions Challenge above, but turned into a board game. The next student tries to make true statements like “It is used while camping” and “It is made of plastic” about the words or pictures on the square they are on, stopping when they say something that is wrong, give up, or reach six correct sentences. They can then move the number of squares of the number of right statements they made, e.g. four squares if they said four right things with the correct grammar.
Present Simple Passive warmer cooler numbers guessing game
Collect some real trivia that can be written as Present Simple Passive plus a number, like “130,000,000 umbrellas are bought every year in Japan”. A student chooses one of the facts, turns it into a question, then gives hints like “No, much higher” and “Close, but a little lower” until their partner guesses exactly the right number.
Making Present Simple Passive trivia quizzes
Although I’m not a huge fan of the teacher testing the general knowledge of their students, it can be really useful for students to make similar quizzes to test each other and the teacher with. To help with ideas, they’ll probably need suggested topics, suggested verbs, and/ or access to the internet. To make the answer questions stage more manageable and so more fun, it’s best if they give two options for each answer, as in “Where are the most olives exported from? A: Spain, B: Italy”.
Present Simple Passive bluff
Make a worksheet with pictures of things and/ or names of things which probably about half the class know, e.g. imported foods that haven’t become very common yet in that country and/ or very local traditions from one part of the country. One student chooses one they don’t know and asks questions like “How is it used?” and “Where is it made?” for their partner to answer, with their partner using their imagination if they don’t know the real answers. The student who asked the questions then guesses how many of the answers were made up.