Errors Committed by Jordanian Undergraduate SFL Students at Al al-Bayt University Regarding the Use of Passive Voice in Spanish

Due to the typical discrepancies between the formation of the passive voice in Spanish and Arabic, university students often make a number of errors when constructing passive voice sentences in Spanish. The current study seeks to locate these different kinds of errors, their underlying causes, and some ways to avoid them. Accordingly, thirty university students enrolled in the Spanish and English Program in a Jordanian public university were asked to take an assessment test in order to determine their errors committed when using the passive voice. It is found that most errors were related to morphological formation, gender and number agreement, and confusion between Spanish passive types. These errors have multiple causes and sources, such as Arabic influence and unfamiliarity with Spanish conjugation and tenses. Confusion between the passive types and gender and number agreement accounted for most errors. Accordingly, instructors should emphasize the special applications of the past participle in the periphrastic passive, which conveys gender and number. Besides, professors should consider the distinctions between the two kinds of passives and thoroughly go over the many tenses and instances of the past participle's morphological development in Spanish.