The revisited Chomsky-Piaget debate: a study to please the relative structure as a cognitive strategy in SLA

Abstract

This work deals with the concept of relativization. My focus is on the acquisition of restrictive relative clause structure by Brazilian Portuguese speakers learning English as a foreign language. This kind of structure was chosen because it is considered one of the main structural devices used in the languages of the world for encoding recursion; it can vary considerably in terms of its distribution and syntactic form. The present work aims to spot some strategies used by learners to solve specific tasks, here called challenges. These challenges invite the use of structures that alternate subject-subject (SS), subject-object (SO), subject-object (OS), object-object (OO) combinations. It is characterized by a syntactic diversity that happens according to the position of the characters (small ball-shaped faces like the ones in some video games) in the challenges. As alternative for the relativization, participants in the activity used strategies such as use of passive voice in one sentence, use of time adverb (time expressions), use of coordinate clause, independent sentences. The participants were 3rd grade high school students aged between 15 and 17 years old. Aspects like age and experience abroad were taken into account. First of all, it was applied a pre-test with English teachers, holders of college degrees, and students from a so-called post advanced level of an English language school in order to validate the instrument (the challenges). Among the strategies, the additive structure (conjunction ‘and’) was the most recurrent, followed closely by relativization. The results showed that these learners make use of their cognitive background in order to develop alternative ways to fulfill the tasks assigned in each challenge. The theoretical part was principally based in AXT 1994.