Correlation Of Teacher Mediation To The English Passive Voice Acquisition

This thesis offers an approach to the understanding of the mediation theory, the English passive voice acquisition and their relationship by investigating them from a correlational perspective. The passive, either semantic or pragmatic, is not a simple order variation of the active construction and it is widely used for a multitude of purposes on the score of its multiple functions. It is found in the research that students make a host of errors when learning this structure and that the intralingual interference is found to be the main causation of those errors. Mediated learning experience or scaffolding is a concept put forward decades ago by psychologists and educators but until recently neither did it attract people's attention nor it was utilized in pedagogy and English language teaching. Based on the hypotheses testing and with SPSS 10.0, a series of significant positive correlations of teacher mediation to students' passive voice proficiency are obtained with the aid of a test, the writer's observation, a questionnaire & interview and participants' scores in the English exam in the Entrance Examination to Senior Middle Schools. The subjects were junior middle school graduates and senior middle school first graders. Both of the comparisons of the individual marks and the mean marks in different classes are taken into consideration while counting the correlation between the two variables: teacher mediation and students' levels of the English passive construction. It is suggested conclusively that teachers should change their traditional role of teacher-as-disseminator into the role of teacher-as-mediator, to help language learners progress and foster the development of their interlanguage towards the target language through interaction, and to take mediational approaches to teach the passive and other language knowledge, so that students would enhance their learning ability and each of them would develop as a whole-person.