Mastering the Use of the Passive Voice in English: A Corpora-Based Project for Mature Advanced Polish Learners of English

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the problem of teaching grammar to advanced adult students of English. It is based on material related to passive voice structures. The material used comes from English and Polish language corpora (British National Corpus, Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego and one parallel corpus, Paralela). The students are taught how to use language corpora to improve their mastery of a foreign language, alongside gaining additional knowledge and skills in using passive voice structures. We place particular stress on the differences in using passive voice structures in English and Polish. This paper is based on results obtained from an actual course that was given to PhD students of the KUL Doctoral School at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in 2021–22.