Abstract
The present study was aimed at investigating Thai EFL learners’ grammatical errors on their use of the relative marker WHERE. The data were collected from undergraduate students’ writings, which represent intermediate learner English, in Thai Learner English Corpus (TLEC).The findings indicate that the participants experienced the greatest difficulty using WHERE, i.e., as if it were functioning as a noun or noun phrase, which apparently emanates from learners’ overgeneralization. In comparison to the results of Phoocharoensil (2012), it seems that a great number of actual errors evidenced by the corpus-based data do not correspond to those found previously. In particular, the errors such as pronoun retention, preposition addition, and non-adjacency of RC to the head, which were prevalent in the past study, evidently occur with far lower frequency in the current study. This probably suggests that such problems reported in the past research may be due to limitations of the elicitation technique, i.e., a sentence combination task. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2014-2001-01
Highlights
Learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) face considerable difficulty in their acquisition of the English relative clause (ERC)
Several research studies on ERC acquisition have so far focused on the use of relative clauses (RCs) introduced by a relative pronoun, e.g., who, whom, which, etc., especially those aiming at confirming or refuting a well-known language universal, such as the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) (Keenan & Comrie 1977), which highlights the roles of the relative pronoun in RC formation (Flanigan 1995, Gass 1979, Izumi 2003, Phoocharoensil 2009, 2010)
The present study has demonstrated the real problems with which Thai EFL learners with an intermediate proficiency level are confronted
Summary
Learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) face considerable difficulty in their acquisition of the English relative clause (ERC). The researcher previously conducted a study investigating adverbial ERCs in the interlanguage of Thai EFL students (Phoocharoensil 2012), certain limitations could be noticed. One of these concerns the sentence-combination task, i.e., the elicitation method in which the participants were asked to merge two simple sentences to form a complex one containing a RC. Some deviant tokens turned out to be artefacts of this research instrument, which are not likely to be sentences produced in their natural production of English
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