A colleague asked me the other day about using the passive
in different verb tenses and forms and what these would look like. Most teachers are fairly confident in using
the simple present and simple past passive forms, but it is important to know
what the other forms look like, especially when identifying good examples in
authentic texts to use in class.
As the passive is included in the statutory appendix of the
2014 National Curriculum and is required teaching for year 6 pupils, I thought
it might be useful to post some key subject knowledge about the active and passive
voices and detail the most common passive tenses and forms, with examples.
Most of the sentences we write are in the active voice. In this structure, the subject of the
sentence is the person or thing which is doing the action and the object of the
sentence is what is being affected by the action. For example:
The dog chased the cat.
subject verb object
doing the (active form) affected by
action the action
The passive voice is formed by using a form of the verb ‘be’
and the past participle of the main verb.
In the passive, the person or thing being affected by the action becomes
the subject of the sentence; the person or thing doing the action may or may
not be provided. For example:
The cat was chased.
subject verb
(past passive form)
affected
by action
The cat was chased by the dog
subject verb
preposition + the agent
affected (past passive form) doing
the action
by action
Below are examples of different tenses and verb forms in the
passive, using the main verb ‘fly’. The list
isn’t exhaustive, but provides the most common variations and a few less usual ones.
She is flown. Simple
present passive
She was flown. Simple
past passive
She is being flown. Present
continuous passive
She was being flown. Past
continuous passive
She has been flown. Present
perfect passive
She had been flown. Past
perfect passive
She will be flown. Simple
future passive
She is going to be flown. Simple
future passive (is going to)
She will be being flown. Future
continuous passive
She is going to be being flown. Future continuous passive (although I find this an ugly structure)
She has been being flown. Present
perfect continuous passive
She had been being flown. Past
perfect continuous passive
She will have been flown. Future
perfect passive
She is going to have been flown. Future perfect passive
She could have been flown. Conditional
present perfect passive
She would have been being flown. Conditional present perfect continuous passive
It will be important for children to understand that we use
the passive to create more formality in writing and that it is often used to
distance the writer from the content being presented. In some cases this enables the writer to ‘hide’
responsibility. For example, the
omission of the agent in the sentence below would hide who to blame or to
thank, depending on your point of view and occupation. (Although for many teachers I know, this
would be a shorter working day!)
‘It has been decided to extend the school day to 9.00 pm.’
Of course, when writing, we may not know who the agent is
and cannot include this information in our sentence. For example, in journalistic writing, the
perpetrator of a crime may not be known: The statue was damaged last night, at
around ten.
