Working Memory and the Acquisition of English Relative Clauses: A Study of Japanese, Chinese and Korean Learners of English as a Second Language

Research related to second language acquisition takes place in several often disparate fields including linguistics, psychology and education. While this has had some influence on the nature of pedagogy and the structure of language textbooks, there are many areas central to teachers¿ experience that remain relatively unexplored. One of these areas is listening comprehension development resulting from direct interaction with native speech. This book explores this development by focusing on the relation of subject and object relatives to working memory. In a classroom study of Asian learners of English, reaction time to longer sentences improved for subject relatives, but not for object relatives. However, for shorter sentences, object relatives improved but subject relatives did not. The results show that development in the processing of object relatives and subject relatives differs and is related to sentence length. Thus, pedagogical approaches which expand their view of language learning to working memory and processing efficiency would seem to be more effective than traditional approaches.

Kenneth Romeo, Ph.D. is the Academic Technology Specialist for the Language Center at Stanford University.