EFL Learners’ Production of Relative Clause Structure: Evidence from Priming Effect

Priming has become increasingly prevalent in applied linguistics and has recently been used in language teaching, being considered as the speakers’ tendency to reuse the same structure that they encounter in previous discourse on subsequent production. The present research investigated whether priming lead to EFL learners’ possible short- and long-term improvement in producing relative clause (RC) structure. Participants comprised 40 female language learners with an average age of 18-25 years old. They were equally assigned to an experimental group and a control group. The needed data was gathered through a grammatical judgment test and a picture description task. The obtained results revealed that learners’ production descriptively improved shortly after priming intervention and similarly in the long run. However, no significant improvement was inferentially observed in short- and long-term production of relative clause structure. The results were discussed in terms of structural complexity, learners’ current state of knowledge, and their proficiency levels. The findings provide insights on priming as a means of enhancing opportunities for EFL and ESL learners’ grammar production.