The Use of Relative Clauses in Taiwanese EFL Graduate Students'' Proposal Writing

• Main Authors: Chia-wei Chang, 張家維
• Other Authors: Tsu-fu Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/47656056891490185480

碩士 === 雲林科技大學 === 應用外語系碩士班 === 98 === The present study investigated the use of relative clauses by Taiwanese EFL graduate students in their proposal writing. The purposes for conducting this study are to examine the acquisition of relative clauses by Taiwanese learners with higher English proficiency and their relative clause use in academic proposal writing, further disclosing the discourse functions of relative clauses and their situational use in proposals. An analysis of 293 relative clauses elicited from eight graduate students’ proposals was conducted through executing frequency counts and textual analysis. The findings of the present study indicated that Taiwanese graduate students commonly use relative clause constructions in their proposal writing and they largely have acquired the use of English relative clauses except restrictive and non-restrictive functions. Moreover, Taiwanese graduate students have not completely mastered the specific used forms of relative clauses in academic writing. Besides, it was also found that relative clauses occurring in the proposals serve three main discourse functions—given entity grounding, proposition-linking grounding, and description. Finally, in the situational use of relative clauses, Taiwanese graduate students generally use relative clauses to state study backgrounds, purposes, and define terms in the section of Introduction. In the section of Literature Review, relative clauses are used in elaborating concepts, presenting extra information, and confining topics for discussion. And in the section of Methodology including a pilot study, relative clauses are used in describing background information about subjects, delimiting subject scope, indicating sources of collected data and measures given to subjects, and expressing analytical focuses and theoretical foundations employed; when study results and conclusions are stated, relative clauses are used to identify sources of analyzed data. Based on the findings of this study, it was obvious that Taiwanese graduate students still have difficulty in distinguishing restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses and overuse restrictive relative clauses in their proposals. In the discourse functions, description function is predominantly used in graduate students’ proposals, but it is also incorrectly used with the restrictive form of relative clauses. Besides, they have not totally learnt the commonly used forms of relative clauses in academic writing. Thus, it was suggested that instructors introduce the concepts of grounding and description in relative clauses to help students better understand the restrictive and non-restrictive functions and teach them the academically common used forms of relative clauses in the class of academic writing; students can benefit from instructors’ introduction, and practicing using the academically used forms of relative clauses.