Learning of relative clauses by L۳ learners of English

In surveys of third language acquisition (TLA) research, mixed results demonstrate that there is no consensus among researchers regarding the advantages and/or disadvantages of bilinguality on  TLA.  The  main  concern  of  the  present  study  was,  thus,  to  probe  the  probable  differences between  Persian  monolingual  and  Azeri-Persian  bilingual  learners  of  English  regarding  their syntactic  knowledge.  It  was  an  attempt  to  investigate  whether  they  differ  significantly  in learning  relative  clauses.  To  carry  out  this  study,  a  total  of  ۲۰۰  female  high  school  students studying at second grade were randomly selected from two educational districts of Tabriz and Shiraz  in  Iran.  The  participants  were  homogeneous  in  terms  of  English  proficiency,  sex,  and age. They attended public high schools; they were taught the same materials and had the same number  of  hours  of  instruction.  A  general  proficiency  test,  a  language  history  questionnaire, and  two  syntactic  structure  tasks  were  administered  to  both  groups.  Statistical  analyses including  t-tests  and  descriptive  statistics  revealed  that  monolinguals  and  bilinguals  differ  in the comprehension and production of English L۳ relative clauses. 

Keywords:

Azeri , Bilingualism , third language , third language acquisition , language background , Persian