Active and Passive Voice Constructions by Indonesian Student Writers

Abstract

Author stance, which echoes authors' attitudes, personal thought, and feeling within the text, can be revealed through preference of voice construction. This study aims at examining the quantitative data of active and passive voice construction used in the English Department of State University of Malang students' theses, as well as exploring the implication arising from the issue. The data in this descriptive qualitative study is taken from a corpus of English Department undergraduate theses written in 2011 to 2013. The corpus data and the frequency of both voice constructions of selected Biber's (2004) stance verbs are calculated using Ant.Conc 3.2.4 corpus software. Findings show that the frequency of active voice construction is higher than that of the passive, as much as 64.8% out of 3901 tokens of the stance verb suggest, expect, show, predict, report, believe, hope, allow are in active voice. The most frequent stance verb in active voice constructions is the verb show, while that in passive voice is the verb expect and the least frequent in both voice constructions is the verb predict. This study suggests that the frequent active voice construction found in Indonesian undergraduate theses resembles English native author's writing style. This fact may indicate Indonesian student author's determination to be acknowledged internationally.

Voice in rhetorical units of results and discussion chapter of master's theses: across science study

“…This finding is not surprising as referring to previous studies are mostly through the use of active voice. In this regards, findings reported in the studies carried out by Fallahi and Erzi (2003) and Yannuar et al (2014) are also stressing the use of active voice while referring to earlier studies. In the active voice, the agent or doer in the sentence takes the responsibility of the claim made.…”

“…Therefore, a strong voice which is the active voice is needed to achieve this purpose. Additionally, the use of the active voice helps the reader to understand better the explanations provided by the writer (Yannuar et al 2014). The following excerpts from the corpus illustrate the use of voice in this step:…”

The Use of Passive Voice in News Reports for Political Purposes

“…The current literature review displays some previous studies conducted on the passive voice and the most prominent conclusions. Yannuar et al (2014) examined the use of active and passive voice forms by Indonesian students. As a secondary purpose, the study attempted to explore the implications resulting from active and passive constructions.…”

“…All of these studies (Yannuar et al, 2014;Unver, 2017;Princess et al, 2018;Amadi, 2018), excluding (Qassim, 2016) placed emphasis on the use of passive voice among foreign learners of English and focused on the difficulties they encountered when using passive voice. However, Qassim (2016) investigated passive and active voice from another angle, that is news reports.…”

Filipino Students' Active-Passive Voice Preference in Invitation Letters

“…Amid the rich literature explaining the nature of voice, there has been less research focusing on the actual preference of voice among students after the concepts have been introduced, at least in the Philippine local context. This is perhaps because of the interchangeable nature of active and passive voice constructions in academic and non-academic writing (Yannuar, Shitadevi, Basthomi, & Widiati, 2014). To this end, two interfacing questions need to be explored in this study: "Can we really prescribe the voice of the verb to use, for example, in invitation letters?…”