Research Info

Abstract Passive voice has been researched extensively to explain how and why writers, researchers, and even teachers use or do not use passive voice in communicating their ideas in written or spoken language. This thesis contributes to the bulk of research on the use of passive structures by investigating passive voice usage in scientific articles written in a foreign language. This thesis aimed at comparing the way passive sentences were used in scholarly written articles in applied linguistics by Iranian and native researchers, and examining to what extent they use passive structures. Specifically, passive sentences were to find out the extent to which this kind of structure was used, whether the agent was mentioned or not, and what types of passive structures were used more frequently. To this end, we randomly selected 180 native English and 60 Iranian articles written in the field of applied linguistics, and after omitting unnecessary parts, both corpora were tagged by TagAnt software. Then, the tagged data were analyzed by AntConc software to look for passive voices. The collected passive structures were counted and categorized into different types of passives regarding the research questions. The findings indicated that Iranian writers were more inclined to use passive voice than native English writers. However, native English writers used passives with agent structures more than Iranian researchers did, and as for the third research question, the most frequent type was passive with be and the least frequent one was prepositional passive in both corpora. It is expected the findings of the study contribute to having a better understanding of passive voice used by academic researchers in applied linguistics. The results of this study will help teachers and researchers decide to what extent it is preferable to use passive sentences, and how largely this structure is being used in academic articles. Considering native English writing style as the norm, the findin