Teaching the Relative Pronoun : Research and Proposal

Abstract

In this paper, I suggest a way of teaching the relative pronoun's functions both as subordinating conjunction and as pronoun. The experiment described in this paper makes it clear that most of the subjects who can comprehend and produce relative clause structures cannot distinguish between the relative pronoun "that" and the conjunction "that" which introduces the appositive clause. This supports a hypothesis that Japanese EFL learners tend to process the relative pronoun as a conjunction. It also suggests that to learn the relative pronoun's two functions, it's better if the learners first regard the relative pronoun just as a conjunction and later as a relative pronoun. On the basis of the result, I suggest what I think is a reasonable way of teaching the relative pronoun's two functions.