Relative Clauses in Second language Acquisition

Abstract

AbstractDespite English and Danish being similar languages, even Danes who are proficient in English (university students of English) seem to have difficulties with relative clauses in English. This paper explores this issue by first making a detailed contrastive analysis of English and Danish, and then comparing the hypotheses drawn from this analysis to a corpus of texts, consisting of essays and summaries in English, and translations from Danish into English, written by Danish university students. The corpus study is supplemented by questionnaires testing the students’ abilities to form relative clauses in English. It is found that the types of errors predicted from the contrastive analysis do occur to a large extent in the students’ texts and in the questionnaire responses.