Investigating the acquisition order of English restrictive relative clauses : evidence from Egyptian EFL learners

Abstract EN

The research area of relative clauses (RCs) has been a significant topic in the field of language acquisition due to the complex syntactic structures of RCs and the difficulties they pose to language learners in processing them.

The aim of the present study is to investigate the learnability of English restrictive RCs by Egyptian adult EFL learners, thus testing four different hypotheses on the acquisition of RCs in English: Keenan's (1975) Relativized Subject Accessibility; Kuno's (1975) Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis (PDH); Sheldon's (1974) Parallel Function and Hamilton's (1994) Subject-Object Hierarchy Hypothesis (SOHH).

A total of 61 Egyptian English-major first-year college students participated in the study.

In addressing this objective, the researcher employed two tests: a Sentence Combination Production Test (SCPT) and a Grammaticality Judgement Test (GJT) in order to examine the learners' knowledge of English RCs.

In the SCPT, the participants were instructed to combine two sentences together using a suitable relative pronoun and in the GJT, they were asked to judge the grammaticality of the given sentences.

The results reveal that Egyptian EFL learners might not be fully aware of the formulation rules of RCs in English (total mean= 56.6% in the SCPT and 72.4% in the GJT).

Findings of the study show that for Egyptian learners, SS and OS relative clause types would be easier to acquire than SO and OO types.

The most marked types of errors made by Egyptian learners were inappropriate positioning of the RC, use of wrong relative pronoun and repetitive use of resumptive pronouns where they are not called for.

The concluding section of the paper ends with some pedagogical implications and recommendations for future research.