Abstract
The aim of this study is to investigate the use of English relative clauses in Japanese and other L2 learners’ writing. To conduct the research, the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) was used to analyze the frequency of relative clauses in English L2 writing by advanced and intermediate university students. The results showed that subjective relative clauses were the most frequently used. In contrast, learners did not use “whose” or “whom” or “that” very often, compared to “who” or “which”. The overuse and underuse of relative clauses seemed to be the result of the syntactic and animacy effect, in addition to the instruction in the classroom.
