First, I am not sure about 'It was broken' being classified as active. It feels like the sentence fits the passive and the active. For 'be', 'He will be discharged'. A formal declarative statement of a neutral process. For 'get', 'He got shafted'. A statement describing an unpleasant outcome, the subject of the verb suffered. This also suggests the finality of the outcome. The verb 'get' is also a sense of effort...'He got released' We also use 'get + passive' informally: 'I got my hair cut'. For have: 'I had my hair cut' just sounds more formal, but to me this really focusses on the organisation I did in terms of checking calendar, booking the appointment and talking to the hairdresser. It also feels more like 'I put things in place so that a barber cut my hair'. In the situation of a regular haircut, no one would say 'My hair is being/will be cut'.

I remember that Japanese has a progressive form, but that this form is not used for futurity. Other structures, 'ni ikimsu' 'ni tsumori'. Interestingly, one grammar book says says 'no future tense in Japanese, but here is how you talk about intention and plan. There is also a way of describing the result of an action as a state, but that structure 'te iru/aru' is around the verb. I do think it is worth learning about your learner's L1 to see if they might 'misselect' or even overlook the possibility of using a progressive or a perfect form. I believe the present perfect tends to get overlooked. However, reflecting on earlier sessions in this course, I remember being suprised at how infrequently it actually is.

Sentence 1: The survey was administered to the students. They anonymously submitted their answers. The first sentence ends with the prepositional phrase 'to the students', which is additional information to 'The survey was administered' in the passive. By ending the sentence with 'students' the reader is set up to then have a new theme, 'the people' which is repeated with 'they'. The theme starts with 'survey' then moves to 'the comment, eg. the anonymity of the participants. More generally, I can imagine these sentences: The students anonymously submitted their answers to the survey. The student answers to the survey were anonymous. The survey was answered anonymously by a group of students. Also, I suggest that to capture the connection between the mention of students and anonymity, there needs to be something about the sample. 'The survey was administered to students from (three/ten/a hundred) different (ethnic/socio-economic groups/educational institutions). They answered the questions anonymously. We do not always need to follow the theme and reme or 'content then comment'. Sometimes parallel structure can highlight connections. 🖖 Sentence 2: The students completed the survey. It consisted of ten True/False questions and took 10 minutes to complete. Here the active structure of the first sentence ends with 'survey' or the object of the verb 'complete'. Then the noun 'survey' becomes 'it' and there are a couple of active verbs. We could tell students that the proximity of survey and it leads from the topic of students to the topic of the survey. The focus here is on the survey in both sentences. We cannot say 'which consisted of ten True/False questions...' as this would imply the students consisted of questions. Just out of interest, Grammarly kindly suggested this rewrite: A group of students anonymously completed a ten-minute survey with ten True/False questions. --- I mention this because I often tell my students not to include redundant information as follows:

'My son is living in Toronto' > a present state, like 'My son lives in Toronto', but it could be recent move. I live in Toronto but Mike is living in Kelowna: a sense of contrast between the speaker's more stable home and Mike's recent move. Where the present simple and the present continuous appear in a sentence with a conjunction, then the sense is that Mike's situation is less permanent. A lot of grammar is about what is already known and unknown and what the speaker believes the other person wants to know.

Hi Everyone, I hope you feel refreshed as we look to start a new year. Why don't we kick things off by sharing our New Year's Resolutions for our teaching businesses? I'll get the conversation going. Recently I was reminded of something a physiotherapist once told me: "Motion is lotion." So, I plan on committing to showing up every single day to do something that helps the LYE Network and our members move forward and stay in the groove. What's yours? Comment below👇