Manijeh Youhanaee - Department of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Iran.
Anna Mirzaiyan - Department of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Iran.
Mohammad Amiryousefi - Department of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Iran.

The present study investigated the role of explicit instruction on the acquisition of English relative clauses by focusing on resumptive pronouns among Iranian learners of English at an intermediate level of proficiency. The study focused on two structurally different languages (Persian and English) regarding the use of resumptive pronouns.  A grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) and a Sentence Combination Task (SCT) at three phases of pre-test, immediate, and delayed posttests, have been used; paired samples t-tests showed that exposure to input through teaching materials can improve the learners’ performance in specific types of relative structures, but not in all.  The findings propose that if language learners, especially in a foreign language context, are provided with enough input and still don’t acquire an uninterruptable feature (resumptive pronouns in this case), then it can be said that fossilization has occurred and the interpretability hypothesis (Tsimpli and Dimitrakopolou, ۲۰۰۷) will be confirmed. It also shows that explicit teaching can lead to future noticing in input and result in more stable acquisition.

Relative clause, Resumptive pronoun, Interpretability Hypothesis, Uninterpretable feature