Hi,
The confusion between passive and active tense has always been a real stumper for me. For example, my girlfriend might say to me: Hey, you look really boring! Hmmn, now you look a little upset :shock:
Any tips on how to help my non-native English speaking friends?
[quote=“gus”]Hi,
The confusion between passive and active tense has always been a real stumper for me. For example, my girlfriend might say to me: Hey, you look really [color=darkred]boring[/color]! Hmmn, now you look a little [color=darkred]upset [/color]:shock:
Any tips on how to help my non-native English speaking friends?[/quote]
Try looking excited and happy…
:o
Fair enough… I left myself wide open for that one. You got me 
Now, ahem, does anyone have any [color=darkred]teaching[/color] tips that I could use?
First, you don’t mean active/passive tense, per se.
Active tense: The lecture bored me.
Passive: I was bored by the lecture.
You’re talking about active and passive voice participle adjectives.
When you describe how the subject feels, use past participle:
Gus was bored.
When you are describing object that causes the reaction, use the present participle form.
Gus’s topic is boring.
Your girlfriend needs drilling. (No jokes, please! 
)
Get some exercises from the internet, or grammar books, or write some up yourself that may have some meaning to you both.
Have her do them. Taiwanese learn well this way. Rote learning is ingrained in their learning styles from a young age. Also, Taiwanese are freaks when it comes to grammar. So explain the grammar clearly.
Ask her: Did the object do the action itself, or was the action done to it by someone else?
Correct her every time she makes a mistake by slapping her hand with a ruler. Eventually, she’ll get it.
If the grammar type explanations don’t work, try the non-grammatical approach of adding ‘me’ to the sentence.
If it’s an -ing ending you could add ‘me’, so:
Gus is fighting me
Gus is talking (to) me
and also
Gus is boring me
Gus is exciting me
This could help students understand that the -ing indicates the effect you have on someone else, not how you feel yourself.
Brian
But the problem with
“Gus is boring me”
is that they’ll forget the damn ‘me’ and make this connection:
“Gus is boring.”
Perhaps Gus really is boring, but Sir Donald Bradman is too “confusing”.
I agree… on both counts.
Sir Don, your first two examples sound like the “tenses” I mistakenly called this thread. These seem like ACTION verbs.
I actually meant the “passive and active voice” as fredericka pointed out. I supposed these are verbs of STATE (STATUS?)
imho, Sir Don’s “me” tip works very well for the Status Verbs that are so troublesome to my non-native English speaking friends. 
:shock: :?