SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The acquisition studies reviewed in this paper have clearly shown the importance of research into the learning and teaching of relative clauses. This line of research has led us to question some of our most basic conceptions regarding acquisition, in particular the assumption that students should always be taught easier constructions first. However, at the same time, the projects have highlighted the undeveloped nature of SLA research. The fact that the majority of acquisition studies into relativization rely upon the flawed “linear” method of relative clause teaching is particularly disappointing. It is important that future research strives to incorporate teaching methodology that more closely resembles real-world language usage. It is also disappointing that the projects reviewed concentrated too much on syntactic factors at the expense of pragmatic and semantic elements. Acquisition studies in this area using learners of Korean would be particularly welcome. Despite the universal nature of some of the findings, it is evident that relativization in Korean relies more on pragmatic and semantic factors than in English and also that KFL differs in vital aspects to EFL. We would especially like to test our assumption that elementary learners of Korean would learn relative clauses best by working from left to right along the hierarchy, whereas advanced learners could improve fluency of all positions by being taught relativization on less accessible constituents.