TEACHING SUGGESTIONS
1. Form. It has been our experience that presenting students with a generative grammar analysis of relative clauses can be very enlightening. Ordinarily we don’t recommend introducing tree diagrams and rules; however, for this particular construction. It has proved helpful for our ESL/EFL students to be able to see how relative clauses are formed in English. You may not wish to draw trees or to call the rules by the names we have used here, but introducing the concept of an embedded sentence seems to be a useful first step for many ESL/EFL students. For instance, give students handouts with sentences in brackets embedded within a main clause; for example:
The students (the students arrived late ) missed the announcement.
Show them how the who is substituted for the coreferential NP. Have them do exercises of a similar nature on their own.