2007, Vol.8, No.3

Modern English Education 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.55

pISSN : 1598-0782 / eISSN : 2586-6141
https://journal.kci.go.kr/meeso

The current study examined the choices of several relative clause (RC) forms; the degree to which these RC forms were considered more appropriate than another in some communicative situations; and linguistic and sociolinguistic factors contributed to the observed preference. The overall results suggest that while no gender differences were found, the choices of RC forms may be explained in terms of the following five factors: (1) the interplay between types of head nouns and those of relative pronouns; (2) informal registers, or the degree of formality; (3) lexical cohesion to keep a conversation coherent; (4) a simplicity principle, and finally (5) a politeness strategy.

This paper examines the acquisition process of the present perfect by an adult ESL learner. The participant is a Chadian ESL learner whose native tongues are Ngambay and French. He was enrolled in a language training program at a Midwestern university at the time of data collection. The researcher collected data from the participant's essays and tests. The results of the study demonstrate that: (1) there is a dramatic increase in the frequency of the present perfect and the percentage of its appropriate uses during and after the period of instruction, (2) the present perfect emerges after the stable use of the present and past tenses, (3) overgeneralization and undergeneralization of the present perfect are caused by misconception of the present perfect as a mixture of the past and the present, and (4) there is a developmental sequence in the acquisition of the present perfect: the feature of experience is acquired more easily and faster than other features of the present perfect.

This paper investigates the classroom learning of English present perfect among 62 adult Korean learners. In particular, the study examined the effect of visual input enhancement and its relations to the lexical aspect of verbal predicates. The results showed that visual input enhancement had a positive role in that learners showed learning effect over the treatment period. In addition, learners' development of the target structure was dependent on the lexical aspect of verbs/verb predicates. Specifically, input enhancement effect was more prominently observed in telics than in activities and states. The findings are insightful in that not all structures are amenable to a similar amount of input enhancement and even those within a single grammatical category, effects of input enhancement may vary.