영어 능숙도에 따른 관계 대명사 습득에 관한 연구

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the acquisition order, or the difficulty hierarchy, of English restrictive relative clauses by Korean EFL learners. This paper examines three hypotheses to predict the Korean learners' acquisition order of English restrictive relative clauses : the Parallel Function Hypothesis (PFH), the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis (PDH), and the Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis (AHH). Forty-five Korean learners of English from a high school performed three tasks including four types of relative clauses which differ in the functions of the head noun and its coreferential relative pronouns : SS-, OO-, SO-, and OS- type relative clauses. The tasks are a grammaticality judgement task, a sentence combination task and a gap-filling task. This study predicts the acquisition order of English restrictive relative clauses, comparing the findings of three tasks with those of three hypotheses. The predicted results of this study show that in the grammaticality judgement task, the AHH best explains the Korean EFL learners' acquisition order of English relative clauses, while the PDH is partially correct in predicting the difficulty order in the sentence combination task. Consequently, Korean EFL learners could consider the OS- and SS- type relative clauses as the easier types of relative clauses, while considering the SO- and OO- type relative clauses as the more difficult types. The predicted acquisition order of English relative clauses could help Korean EFL learners acquire English relative clauses more easily. Ultimately, the acquisition of proper English relative clauses could lead Korean EFL learners to appropriate English reading comprehension.