English Relative Clause Extraposition : A Pedagogical Approach

This paper proposes a pedagogical approach that L2 learners of English should acquire a relative clause extraposition (RCE) through an explicit grammar teaching. RCE construction is a marked feature in English, but the extraposition is frequently employed in English. Thus, understanding it in an appropriate manner plays a significant role in acquiring the target language. In doing so, we first introduce the grammatical properties of a total of 597 examples of RCE construction from COCA and BYU-BNC and then emphasize the importance of a corpus-based grammar teaching in L2 classroom. Some of its characteristics are the indefiniteness of a subject NP, the dominance of passive voice, and the heaviest grammatical weight within an extraposed relative clause. Infinitival RCE construction also has an identical behavior with finite RCE construction. With the help of the discourse-based classification of RCE construction, Discourse-New-Old- RCE stays on the top in the frequency rate, thus implying that it is appropriate to employ RCE construction when a speaker or writer wants to convey a discourse-new information within a subject NP and puts a discourse-old content within an extraposed restrictive relative clause. Considering these corpus findings, the grammar teaching should not be given in itself, but involved with the discourse or sociolinguistic factors. Subsequently, we elaborate on a wide range of variables to facilitate the acquisition of the corpus-based RCE construction: age, register, proficiency level, markedness, strategy, transferability, structuralization, generalization process, motivation. In order to acquire RCE construction, L2 learners are more likely to be adults with an advanced level of formal English skills with consciousness of a marked feature of the extraposition phenomenon. An intensive grammar instruction and deductive reasoning also need to be introduced in the acquisition process, thus ultimately leading us to realize the fundamental reasons to employ RCE construction: grammatical weight and focus effect.