Early transformational grammar accounts and many EST/EFL texts tended to treat the passive voice as if it were a syntactic variant of the active voice. We have attempted to argue against this characterization of the passive. In fact , use of the two voices is motivated by different reasons. One would find a passive in a discourse for which an active voice sentence would not be appropriate. For this reason. we think that it is misleading to students to present the passive as if it were derived from the active voice. Learning when to use the passive is a challenge to EST/EFL students, who will tend to over-or under –use it depending on its frequency of occurrence and its functions in their native languages. Therefore, it is better from the start to introduce the passive as a grammatical structure with a particular use of its own.