Using Relative Clauses of Subject-Subject and Subject-Object: Comparison of the writings of Arab-speaking Persian learners in Intermediate and Advanced Level

In recent decades, research and studies on the processing of grammatical structures related to the relative clauses in different languages, have been brought into focus in linguistic researches. The present research aims to investigate the extent to which Arab-speaking Persian learners apply relative clauses (subject-subject and subject-object). In addition, it analyses the errors they make in using this grammatical category. To do so, syntactic and pragmatic measure of applying and understanding these structures in the sentences were examined among two groups of Persian learners who were divided in two groups of intermediate and advanced level. For this purpose, a total number of 64 texts, written by Arabic-speaking learners of Persian in Imam Khomeini International University of Qazvin, were evaluated. It should be mentioned that these types of grammatical structures were already taught in writing courses. The results showed that both the first (intermediate level) and the second group (advanced level) had more difficulty in producing subject-object relative clauses compared to subject-subject ones. It was also revealed that Persian learners in advanced level employed more Persian relative clauses than intermediate level learners. Moreover, even with the slight difference between the number of errors in each group of learners, findings related to the number of each type of errors showed that the most frequent errors in intermediate level were related to the incomplete main clause while the least frequent errors occurred in in omitting relative clause pronoun (i.e., that) and incorrect removal of object in the subject-object relative clauses. However, in advanced level group the most errors were observed for incomplete main clause and incorrect omission of the object in subject-object relative clauses. Furthermore, the least errors in advanced level could be attributed to incorrect removal of relative clause pronoun.