An Investigation of the Learnability of Relative Clauses by EFL Learners

Abstract

Relative clauses as complex syntactic structures in human languages have attracted the attention of a lot of second
language acquisition researchers. They are difficult for learners to produce, comprehend and imitate. The present
study was an attempt to investigate the learnability of the English relative clauses by Persian learners. After
discussing the importance of relative clauses, the role it plays in language acquisition, the hypotheses were proposed
and investigated. The findings show that the acquisition or frequency rank order of four types of relative clauses was
OS > OO > SS > SO, and that OS and OO relative clause types would be easier to acquire than SS and SO types.