It is acknowledged that in order to adequately describe second language learners’
interlanguage, both the actual performance of the learners and their intuitions about the target language must be taken into consideration (Schachter, Tyson, and Diffley, 1976). There are two types of data that are in question here: performance data, based on the actual linguistic production by the learners; intuitional data, based on learner reaction to already produced sentences, such as judgments of grammaticality and ungrammaticality. In this study, there are three kinds of elicitation tasks that are used: sentence combination, English-Chinese translation, and grammaticality
judgment, in which the sentence combination and translation were meant to elicit learners’ performance data whereas the grammaticality judgment generated learners’
intuitional data. The test items that were used in these tasks are adapted from Azar (1999), Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) and Chen, C. S. (2004).
3.5.1 Sentence combination task
Sentence combination is a typical type of elicitation researchers use in eliciting relative clauses. Quite a number of previous studies adopted this test to collect data concerning relative clauses (see Flanigan, 1995; Gass, 1979, 1980; Izumi, 2003; Wei, 1997; Eckman, Bell, and Nelson, 1988; Hamilton, 1994).
This section contains 12 items in which each item taps into each types of relative clauses that are tested in this study. For example, in (1) the subjects were told to embed sentence (B) into sentence (A) and supply an appropriate relative pronoun, such as who, which , whose, that, so as to produce the relative clause types of OS, Jerry likes the teacher who explained the answers to the class. The distribution of each type of relative clause is at random.
(1)
(A) Jenny likes the teacher.
(B) He explained the answers to the class.
?
It is expected that evidence for the research questions 1-5 is to be gained in this test. In particular, while Gass (1980) used this task to elicit data for the evidence of learner avoidance of relative clause formation, the productive data in this study will be analyzed in this respect.
3.5.2 Chinese-English translation task
Elicited translation is a good way of exploring learners’ interlanguage, where
researcher is able to see how learners transform native language to target language and how well they grasp the rules of English (Chen, 2004). It is believed that subjects’ performance approximates natural speech productio n as they are engaged in the decoding of the stimulus sentence and the encoding of the translation
(Larsen-Freeman and Long, 1994).
In this task, there are two subsections, the first one asking learners to directly translate Chinese relative clauses to English ones and then supply appropriate relative pronouns, as in (2), in which the SO type of English relative clauses is expected: “The book which I read is interesting”. This first subsection contains ten items. As with the sentence combination test, the items for each type of relative clause were
randomly distributed, with the exception of OCOMP, which was placed in the subsection two.
(2)
我讀過的這一本書很有趣。
?
The second subsection taps into object of comparative. Due to the fact that Chinese does not allow relativization on the object of comparative, the sentence combination was designed in order that subjects were to combine the Chinese
sentence before translating it to English. Item (3) was designed to elicit the English counterpart, “The student who Bill is taller than came”.
(3)
(A) 那個學生來了。
(B) Bill 比他高。
?
As with sentence combination task, evidence is anticipated to be obtained for research questions 1-5 in translation task. Since this test involves learners
translating Chinese into English, any influence from Chinese is of special interest in this section, in addition to the difficulty order of the 12 types of relative clauses.
Three sub-questions are the focus of the task. First, because Chinese does not allow relativization of object of comparative, a possibility exists that lack of use of the comparative may occurs, or that strategies of avoidance may be used. Second, Chinese relative clauses have resumptive pronouns retained in direct object, indirect object, and object of preposition, so whether there are higher possibilities that learners might supply resumptive pronouns in the English counterparts than the other two tasks is also an interesting question. Last, it is speculated this test might receive lower accuracy rate than the other two tests due to the interference of Chinese.
3.5.3 Grammaticality judgment task
Learners’ intuitional data were long to be stressed as important when an adequate account of learners’ interlanguage is to be elicited, and grammaticality judgment is a valid means of obtaining the necessary intuitional data (Schachter, Tyson, and Diffley, 1976). The idea that acquisition is evident in what learners know intuitively is also supported by Ellis (2005). Many studies incorporates grammaticality judgment task, which signifies that grammaticality judgment is a standard tool in second language acquisition research (Gass, 1979, 1980; Izumi, 2003; Ioup and Kruse, 1977).
Grammaticality judgment in this study also compensates what sentence combination and English-Chinese translation cannot do to reveal what is lacking in learners’
interlanguage (Gass & Selinker, 2001). For example, learners may correctly produce object of preposition type of relative clause, such as, I looked for the book whcih Tom was talking about. But they may not be able to correctly identify the error in the sentence, *I looked for the book who Tom was talking about, where the relative pronoun who should be which instead. In addition to the need of identifying what is not correct, the present study also required the subjects to correct the errors.
There are 29 items in this task in which 18 are grammatically correct and 11 are grammatically incorrect, which are randomly distributed. Three categories of errors were used in formulating the incorrect items, namely relative marker omission, pronoun retention, and incorrect use of relative marker. Table 4 illustrates the grammatically incorrect sentences.
Table 3.4 Three categories of errors in the grammaticality judgment task
Categories Example sentences
1. Relative marker omission * Almost all of the people appear on television wear makeup.
2. Pronoun retention * The car that the man drove it was very fast.
3. Incorrect use of relative marker
*Bob admires the professor which John lives next to.