Analyzing the Use of Relative Clauses in a Corpus of Argumentative Essays by IranianEFL Learners

Syntactic complexity has received a great deal of attention in the literature on second language writing. Relative clauses, which function as a kind of noun phrase post-modifier, are among those structures that are believed to increase the complexity of academic prose. This grammatical structure canpose difficulties for EFL writers even at higher levels of proficiency, and it is therefore important to determine the frequency and accuracy with which relative clausesare usedby L2 learners;understanding learners’ strengths and weaknesses in using these structures can inform the process of their instruction in the writing classroom.This paper reports on a corpus-based comparison of relative clauses in a number of argumentative essays written by native and nonnative speakers of English. To this end, 30 argumentative essays were randomly selected from the Persiansub-corpus of the ICLE and the essays were analyzed with respect torelative clauses found in them. The results were then compared to a comparable corpus of essays by native speakers. Different dimensions regarding the structure of relative clauses were investigated, such as the role of relativizers, the gap, and the modified head nouns. The type of relative clause (restrictive/non-restrictive), the relativizer (adverbial/pronoun), the gap (subject/non-subject), and head nouns (both animate and non-animate) in our two sets of data were manually identified and coded. The Findings revealed that Iranian EFL writers tend to use a greater number of relative clauses compared to their native-speaker counterparts.

کلیدواژه ها:

relative clauses ، learner writing ، argumentative essays ، ICLE ، LOCNESS