Chapter 5 General Discussion
5.5 Pedagogical implications
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the interactionist models in that readers make use of the linguistic cues available at the moment to recognize the words and integrate the words into the sentence structure.
The linguistic cues include not only syntactic cues but also semantic cues like plausibility and animacy. Readers may find ambiguities based on the cues. To solve the ambiguities, they have to regress to the ambiguous region to reanalyze their interpretation. There are several critical words that readers often re-visit to achieve successful integration. Eye movement recording technique enables us to look into the details of sentence processing.
5.5 Pedagogical implications
The present study offers several pedagogical implications. The present study can be applied to Chinese language teaching and first language teaching. Since RC is a complex structure, learners do not fully develop RC structure after years of learning.
Less complex structures can be introduced first to raise student’s learning motivation and facilitate their acquisition. In terms of the structural complexity, subject-modifying RCs are less embedded than object-modifying RCs in a head-final language like Chinese, so subject-modification is easier than object-modification (Lin, 2006). Therefore, it is better to introduce subject-modification first and then
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object-modification, as shown in (30a). As for subject-object asymmetry, the ORCs are more difficult than SRCs in general since the disambiguating position is later and they involve perspective shifting at the main verb, which is the critical position for integrating the relative clause and the main clause. Thus, SRCs can be introduced earlier to learners than ORCs, as in (30b).
(30) Step-by-step introduction of RCs in terms of structural complexity and semantic cues
a. Modification type
Î [subject-modification] >> [object-modification]
b. RC type
Î [SRC] >> [ORC]
c. Semantic plausibility of argument-verb relation Î [irreversible] >> [reversible]
d. Animacy of entities
Î [animate] >> [inanimate]
e. Animacy configuration
Î [animate agent],[inanimate patient] >> [inanimate agent], [animate patient]
The biases of thematic role assignment based on plausibility and animacy can reduce the difficulty of the structure, in order to help learners learn the complex
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structure. When RC structure is first introduced in the teaching materials, the irreversible argument-verb relation can help learners acquire the complex structure with ease. After the learners have become familiar with the RCs with irreversible relation, teachers may start to teach RCs with the reversible relation (30c). In the beginning, the reversible relation can be made easier by making both of the arguments animate (30d). Then, the configuration of an animate agent and an inanimate patient can be introduced later and then the configuration of an inanimate agent and an animate patient (30e).
Therefore, the teaching materials of RCs can facilitate acquisition, leading learners to learn the complex structure step by step. It is suggested that teaching materials and syllabuses should take structural complexity and semantic factors into consideration.
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