The Effects of Explicit Instruction on English Relative Clauses
Keywords:
English Relative Clauses, The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, Thai EFL LearnersAbstract
English relative clauses (ERCs) seem to be a problem for Thai EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners. Literature always mentions ERCs as a part of syntactic problems. Thus, this study aims to solve this problem through a teaching model called explicit instruction. Another objective of the study is to what extent the university performance fits the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) in that Subject ERC is the easiest form and Genitive ERC is the more difficult one. Twenty-two English-major education students spent four weeks learning ERCs through the explicit instruction. The findings show that students performed better in a sentence combining test and a translation task; statistically significant difference was found in both tests. Nonetheless, their performance did not fit the NPAH in all cases. The Subject ERC became the easiest form to acquire, but the Object and Genitive ERCs show inconsistent results from the sentence combining test and the translation task. That is, students performed Genitive ERC better than the Object ERC, but in the translation task, student had higher score in Object ERC than Genitive ERC.
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