The Usage of Psychological Passives in Spoken and Written English: A Corpus-based Analysis and Implications for English Language Teaching

This article aims to compare conversation data and written data from the BNC regarding the usage of psychological passives (e.g. John was surprised by/at Bill.) in order to understand more thoroughly important differences and similarities and to consider these in relation to ELT in Japan. Despite a gradual shift in ELT toward the communicative approach in Japan, psy-passives continue to be taught by sentence-level rote-learning based on primarily invented written examples. Recent linguistic research has suggested that it is useful to consider authentic spoken and written data when trying to understand linguistic features. Thus, the comparison of spoken and written data regarding the construction was expected to be fruitful for Japanese learners and teachers.