Receptive passive competence of secondary students in Germany

Passives are a grammatical feature associated with academic language and frequently assumed to cause comprehension difficulties. The empirical results, however, especially with regard to secondary school students and the target language German, are inconclusive. This study therefore investigated secondary school students’ ability to comprehend German passive structures in a picture selection listening task. The task consisted of 30 items which comprised transitive, progressive and resultative passive sentences as well as active sentences and was issued to 143 German secondary school students (Grade 6 and Grade 9). Background variables were obtained through a questionnaire. The results showed that while the large majority of students performed at ceiling, there is some variation in the performance, in particular in transitive passives. Grade 6 students perform somewhat weaker than Grade 9 students, and students who had had more opportunities to encounter academic language use in their homes performed slightly better than the ones who did not. This strengthens the insight that regular secondary school students overall can be assumed to comprehend passives; however, it is to be expected as part of the normal range in regular school classes that some students do not, especially from less advantaged academic backgrounds and in lower grades. Therefore, clarification and learning opportunities need to be given in order to provide good learning opportunities for all students.