The passive voice is one of the common grammar topics in the teaching of English. It is often found that the conversion of the active voice into the passive is taught as a mechanical exercise. The functions that the passive performs are not explained to students. As a result, students may not know whether to retain the agent phrase in the passive clause or not. But, as Svartvik (1966) and Kawale (2008) find, the agentless passive is the most common passive type in British English (BrE) and Indian English (IE), respectively. No matter whether the teachers want to teach BrE or standard IE to Indian students, they must not lose sight of the centrality of the agentless passive in their teaching. Students should also be made aware of the functions that the passive performs. Questions on the passive in question papers should also be set with all this in mind. Examination questions on the passive often expect students to think of the active-passive conversion as a mechanical exercise. The nature of evaluation often influences the teaching of the topic concerned. Therefore, the general features of the passive have important implications as far as the teaching and evaluation of this topic is concerned.

The passive voice has been studied from different points of view in various grammars. The study by Svartvik (1966) is the first and most important empirical, corpus-based analysis of the use of the passive in English. Kawale (2008) makes a corpus-based study of the form, functions and frequency of the passive in Indian English (IE), based on the model used by Svartvik (1966), and applying it to the data collected from the two corpora of IE that are currently available. Svartvik (1966) defines the passive as a construction with `be' (or an auxiliary commutable with `be') and a past participle. Even if his definition is not acceptable to some, what becomes clear from his findings is that the agentless passive is the most common type of passive used in British English (BrE). Kawale (2008) finds the same in the passive in IE, too.

The linguists and educationists who support the view that IE is a valid variety of English believe that standard IE should be taught to Indian students. No matter whether we want to teach BrE grammar or introduce IE grammar to Indian students, the general features of the passive have some pedagogical implications; these are dealt with in this paper.

Dagut (1985) stresses the need for a teaching grammar. A teaching grammar, he points out, aims to provide teachers of English as the First Language (EFL) with the linguistic information that they require for effective teaching. A teacher's grammar is concerned with the `meaning' expressed by a structure, rather than with the structures as such. It focuses on `performance', and mainly semantic and pragmatic performance, rather than on `competence'. A teaching grammar is "a performance grammar, taking surface forms as its input and their functioning as its output, with no attempt to discover any underlying uniform system of English structure" (p. 3). He gives the example of the passive to demonstrate how a teaching grammar can be developed.

English Studies Journal, Passive Voice, Indian English, Conversion Exercise, English Structure, Linguistic Patterns, Passive Constructions, Impersonal Construction, Mechanical Exercise, HSC Examination Papers, Agentless Passive.