The Acquisition of "contact clause" concept among the college students

Abstract

Grammar itself is not existed as a learning item in the teaching lists in the Course of Study of both junior and senior high school published by the education ministry in Japan. However, no teacher denies the necessity of acquisition of grammatical items such as infinitive, participle, gerund, relative pronouns, and so forth. Among others, the item of "contact clause" has special position to learners of English as a foreign language in Japanese schools. In this paper, the investigation of what level the college students have acquired the contact clauses through several tests, and on the basement of the result, the analysis of the reasons why the students have felt difficult to master the item. The informants are all the college students at Kisarazu National College of Technology. (KNCT in short) This paper is the first of the three series of the study on the basement of experimental results concerning the clauses. (1) The result of the acquisition of the contact clause by the upper grade of KNCT (2) The result by the lower grade students of KNCT (3) The Deeper Analysis from the six different sentence sorts