English relative clauses and the production difficulty facing native speakers of Kiswahili

Abstract

This article examines the production of English relative clauses by native speakers of Kiswahili to determine the difficulty they face. Data were collected at a high school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, using a sentence combination task and a grammaticality judgement task. Data analysis is grounded in the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH). The results show that to a great extent the respondents follow the predictions of the NPAH in producing English relative clauses. They also show that the respondents have mastered genitive relative clauses better than direct object ones. This finding poses a challenge to the NPAH, which regards genitive relative clauses as more difficult than direct object clauses. Furthermore, the respondents committed several errors. It is concluded that they had serious difficulty producing the clauses in question. Therefore, the article suggests lingo-pedagogical strategies that could be used in learning and teaching the clauses.