Abstract
The main purpose of this work is to obtain a better understanding of the linguistic difficulties encountered by Iranian learners of English. The knowledge gained will, therefore, form a basils for the design of teaching materials and for the improvement of techniques of teaching English as a foreign language. The work is also intended to make a contribution to the theory of error analysis, which is the basic approach adopted. The study concentrates on the passive construction since this is frequently used in scientific discourse (as confirmed by the research of Svartvik (1966) and Huddleston (1971)) and a high proportion of Iranian learners of English, in Britian are science students. The thesis has nine chapters. The first chapter identifies the problems for which a solution is sought, explains the aim of the study, surveys previous studies and gives an outline of the proposed methodology. Chapter II gives a description of the passive in Persian and English. Chapters III and IV identify the types of errors made by the two groups of Iranian students in their comprehension and production of the ordinary passive constructions. Chapter V consists of two parts. The first part attempts to define some rules in relation to the use of the indirect object in sentence initial position and the omission of the preposition of indirect objects in the first and second passive constructions respectively. This part also describes a rule with regard to the use of the indirect object in conjunction with three place verbs. The second part of this chapter explains the source of errors responsible for the students' failure to introduce the preposition of indirect objects in the first passive construction with regard to the rule described for the omission of the preposition of indirect objects in the first part. Chapter VI provides the results obtained from the study. Chapter VII deals with the analysis of errors which are not directly relevant to the passive construction and proposes ways in which the errors could be avoided. Chapter VIII defines the errors made by a group of students in their comprehension and production of the mutative passive (the get passive) and presents the results gained from the study. In Chapter IX some pedagogical recommendations are made with regard to the information obtained from the study of Iranian learners' errors in comprehension and production of the passive in the written language. The theoretical implications of the analysis are discussed in various stages in the thesis. One particularly interesting result is that errors caused by mother tongue interference are not only due to the learners' awareness of the rules of the first language but also they can be the result of their confusing a specific grammatical rule of their mother tongue for another when they translate from the target language into their mother tongue.