Relative Clause

In order to establish the why of noticing, it is imperative to empirically explore the factors that potentially mediate noticing. This study aimed to explore two factors that are believed to affect noticing: the complexity of target structures and learners’ second language (L2) proficiency level. English relative clauses (RCs) were selected as the target structures, and Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis (AHH) was taken as the measure of the complexity of the RCs. A sample of 113 freshmen English language majors were selected as the participants of the study. A test of English RCs was developed as the placement test, and Key English Test (KET) was used to classify the participants into three groups of High (N=38), Mid (N=37), and Low (N=38) L2 proficiency level. Note-taking was used as the measure of noticing. After administering the RC test and the proficiency test, the participants were given a number of authentic reading texts containing instances of RCs and were required to take notes during reading activity. The non-parametric Friedman’s test demonstrated that the complexity of RCs positively affected the participants’ noticing while the non-parametric ANCOVA indicated that the participants’ L2 proficiency level had no significant effect on noticing. The findings of this study can be helpful to both teachers and material developers in providing learners with optimal conditions for noticing linguistic forms, which in turn, could facilitate L2 learning.

The present study investigated the role of explicit instruction on the acquisition of English relative clauses by focusing on resumptive pronouns among Iranian learners of English at an intermediate level of proficiency. The study focused on two structurally different languages (Persian and English) regarding the use of resumptive pronouns.  A grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) and a Sentence Combination Task (SCT) at three phases of pre-test, immediate, and delayed posttests, have been used; paired samples t-tests showed that exposure to input through teaching materials can improve the learners’ performance in specific types of relative structures, but not in all.  The findings propose that if language learners, especially in a foreign language context, are provided with enough input and still don’t acquire an uninterruptable feature (resumptive pronouns in this case), then it can be said that fossilization has occurred and the interpretability hypothesis (Tsimpli and Dimitrakopolou, 2007) will be confirmed. It also shows that explicit teaching can lead to future noticing in input and result in more stable acquisition.