Semantic and syntactic problems in using relative clauses in english of yendinh high school students

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES - - TRỊNH ĐÌNH LAN Semantic and syntactic problems in using relative clauses in English of Yendinh high school students (Những vấn đề ngữ nghĩa cú pháp sử dụng mệnh đề quan hệ Tiếng Anh học sinh trường Yên Định) M.A MINOR THESIS Field: Methodology Code: 60.14.10 Hanoi, 2011 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES - - TRỊNH ĐÌNH LAN Semantic and syntactic problems in using relative clauses in English of Yendinh high school students (Những vấn đề ngữ nghĩa cú pháp sử dụng mệnh đề quan hệ Tiếng Anh học sinh trường Yên Định) M.A MINOR THESIS Field: Methodology Code: 60.14.10 Supervisor : Dr Hà Cẩm Tâm Hanoi, 2011 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION page i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii ABSTRACT iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv PART A: INTRODUCTION I Rationale I Objectives of the study I Research Question I Scope of the study I Significance of the study .2 I Methodology I Organization of the study PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW .4 1 Overview of relative clauses Syntactic features of relative clauses Components of relative clauses 2 Types of relative clauses 2 Finite relative clauses 2 1 The uses of relativizers 2 Relative clauses with adverbial gaps 12 Positions of relative clauses 14 Semantic features of relative clauses 16 Restrictive relative clauses 16 Non - Restrictive relative clauses .18 3 Finite relative clauses 19 Review of previous researches in the area 21 CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY 23 Research question 23 v 2 Design of the study .23 2 Participants 23 2 Data collection instruments 23 2 Data collection 24 2 Analytical framework 24 2 Data analysis 26 2 Exercise 26 2 Exercise 29 2 Exercise 31 PART C: CONCLUSION 33 I Major findings 33 II Implications .34 III Limitations and suggestions for further study 34 REFERENCES 36 APPENDIX I APPENDIX IV PART A: INTRODUCTION This part introduces the rationale, objectives of the study, research question, scope of the study, significance of the study, methodology Also, organization of the study is outlined I Rationale As we know, English has now become the most popular language in the world In Vietnam, it has been more appreciated especially after the country joined WTO Children learn the language even from kindergarten school More importantly, English has been influenced on our education curriculum as a compulsory subject After years teaching English at a high school in Yendinh, I find that many students are experiencing a lot of difficulties when learning English in common and learning to use relative clauses in particular They often make many mistakes in building sentences containing relative clauses such as, wrong use of relativizers, repetition of the noun/pronoun in the relative clauses, wrong position of the relative clauses, confusion between restrictive and nonrestrictive relatives, lack of relative pronouns, lack of subject-verb agreement, etc I Objectives of the study The study aims to find out semantic and syntactic problems of Yendinh high school students’ in using relative clauses in English in order that teachers can help them improve their English I Research Question In this paper, the following question would be addressed: What problems in using English relative clauses in terms of semantics and syntactics high school students often have? I Scope of the study The research question mentioned above has already implied that the research is focused only on:  full relative clauses in English  high school students The 10th graders at Yendinh High School are approximately 16 years of age They come from the villages surrounding the school Most of their parents are farmers whose main work is doing farming So the students here not have good conditions to learn English Moreover, they have different learning abilities and have different attitudes towards learning English: some are learning for the entrance exams to colleges or universities, some are learning only for graduating the final exams and others are learning for nothing, i.e they cannot identify what they learn English for They consider English as a subject they have to learn at school Additionally, most of our students have low English proficiency They have learnt English for four years at secondary schools However, their English background knowledge has been limited When they come to the 10th form, it is surprising that they have limited vocabulary and grammatical structures For some students, the things they have learnt at secondary school seem to be completely new at the moment With the above mentioned aims and due to limited time and size for a minor thesis, I would like to deal with written test only The test for students is taken out from books, textbooks, grammar books and reference books in English I Significance of the study It is hoped that the findings of the study would help teachers and students to overcome the problems and could improve their English performance, especially in using relative clauses I Methodology Quantitative and qualitative method was applied for this thesis A written test was used as data collection instrument Data collection was administered to 40 high school students to get information for the study I Organization of the study This paper is divided into three parts: Part A: Introduction includes rationale, objectives, research question, scope of the study, significance of the study, methodology, organization of the study are presented Part B: Development consists of two chapters: Chapter provides theoretical background Chapter is the study It includes methodology and outlines the study design, participants, data collection instruments, data collection, analytical framework, and data analysis Part C: Conclusion offers major findings, implications, limitations and suggestions for further study PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW In this chapter, a brief description of various propositions about the relative clauses will be discussed It is divided into three main sections Firstly, section 1.1 is the overview of relative clauses Secondly, section discusses syntactic features of relative clauses Next is section which discusses semantic features of relative clauses The last section reviews previous researches in the area 1 Overview of relative clauses A relative clause, also called an adjective clause, is a dependent clause that modifies a noun or a pronoun by making it more specific or adding additional information about it Relative clauses are typically found after a noun phrase and provide some information about the person or thing indicated by that noun phrase They are sometimes called ‘adjective clauses' because, like many adjectives, they often describe and help to identify the person or thing being talked about (Yule, 1998, p 240) Relative clauses in the following sections are explored not only with syntactic features but also semantic feature Syntactic features of relative clauses In this section, the components of relative clauses and their possible positions of relative clauses are discussed first, after that is types of relative clauses which are classified according to their internal structures Components of relative clauses A relative clause is a group of words (relativizer, subject and verb) that comes after a noun and modifies and/or restrict that noun, which is called the antecedent noun The relative clause gets embedded in the main clause of the sentence; it becomes a subordinate clause within the main clause Note how the second sentences below are turned into relative clause and embedded in the sentences (A = antecedents noun; R = relativizer; S = subject; V = verb) The person was Bob Geldof - He was responsible for the concert The person who was responsible for the concert was Bob Geldof A R/S V It was a program - Geldof is not likely to forget the program It was a program that Geldof is not likely to forget A R S V When discussing relative clauses, we will focus on three key components: the head noun, the relativizer, and the gap The head noun is the noun modified by the relative clause The relativizer is the word, such as who or that …, which introduces the relative clause It refers to the same person or thing as the head noun The gap is the location of the missing constituent in the relative clause All relative clauses have a missing constituent, which again corresponds in the meaning to the head noun Thus, consider the relative clause construction: … the diamond earrings that Mama wore /\ (fict) The head noun is earrings The relativizer is that, referring to the ‘earrings’ The gap occurs in the direct object position, after the verb wore The underlying meaning of the relative clause is that ‘Mama wore earrings’ (Biber et al, 1999) 2 Types of relative clauses Relative clauses have two main types according to their structures They are the finite relative clauses which contain a finite verb as the main verb in the clauses and the nonfinite relative clauses which only contain a non-finite verb as the main verb for the finite verb is often omitted The study would like to focus only on finite relative clauses (full relative clauses) due to the scope of the study 2 Finite relative clauses They are relative clauses with the serving of a relative pronoun The relative pronoun usually acts as the subject or object of the verb in the relative clause; sometimes, it can play the role of adjuncts The most common relative pronouns are that, which, who, whom, whose 2 1 The use of relativizers In Standard English, relative clauses can be formed using eight different relativizers: which, who, whom, whose, that, where, when and why The following are examples: The lowest pressure ratio which will give an acceptable performance is always chosen (Biber et al, 1999, p 608) The man who robbed you has been arrested The man whom I saw told me to come back today The film is about a spy whose wife betrays him Well, that's the only way that this can be assessed (Biber et al, 1999, p 608) I could lead you to the shop where I bought it That is the period when he lived here That is the reason why he spoke (Quirk, 1987, p 380) In addition, the relativizer can be omitted with many relative clauses (referred to as the zero relativizer) For example: The next thing she knows, she is talking to Danny To some extent the choice of relativizers is determined grammatically by the role of the gap in the relative clause Thus, the pronoun ‘whom’ and the zero relativizer (with rare exceptions) are used only with non-subject gaps; the pronoun ‘whose’ is used only with possessive/genitive gaps; and the relative adverbs: ‘where, when and why’ are used only with adverbial gaps However, the choice among relativizers is influenced by a number of additional factors These other factors include: register, restrictive vs non-restrictive function, and animate (human) vs non-animate head noun In addition, non-dialects include other relativizers, which are briefly covered in the following sections: There is considerable dialect variation in the range of relativizers used in conversation For example, the form ‘as’ is sometimes used as a relativizer, as in: Well, I know one person as'11 eat it The wh-word ‘what’ is somewhat more common as a relativizer in Br.English conversational texts, although it is much rarer than the standard forms: who, which, and that Here are some examples: And you see that truck what just went by Gotta makes sure she's got the book what I had last week 28 that they recognized only the last noun tanks in the above noun phrase, and they used which instead of that The second highest error in the use of relativizers as shown in table was which with a total of 30 errors or an error rate of 75 % The misuse of which was prevalent in this study For example, the informants were asked to select one relativizer out of the four relativizers such as, where, who, that or which to fill in the blank of the following sentence: 'We first went to Edinburgh, ………… is the capital of Scotland' For this question, most informants selected who, where and that This seems to indicate that informants misused those relativizers in the above question because they misunderstood that the head noun, Edinburgh, referred to a person or a place or they did not understand the syntactic and semantic features of the relativizers they used In fact, Edinburgh was a proper noun referring to a place, so it should be modified by only relativizer which The third most mistaken use of relativizers as shown in table was related to whose Twenty eight out of forty answers were wrong accounting for 70 % This finding seems to show that the use of whose was also one of the most problematic relativizers for all the informants The question quoted below was an example: The informants were asked to select one relativizer out of the four relativizers such as, whom, whose, that, or who, to fill in the blank of the following sentence: 'The man son has just passed the entrance examination is very rich' For this question, most informants selected who and whom It seems that they thought the antecedent the man referred to human head noun; they did not pay much attention to the noun son, so they selected who, that and whom instead of whose Correct choice is based on a better understanding of relativizers However, due to the shortage of their understanding of relativizers, those informants misused those words in their papers The fourth most error incidence of exercise 1, whom, occurred 27 times, at an error rate of 76.5% In the question quoted below, whom was requested to select to fill in the blank: 'The teacher with………… we studied last year no longer teaches in our school a which b who c whom d whose' For this question, most informants selected who and whose while some others chose which 29 This seems that informants misused those relativizers in the above question because they were confused whom with the remained relativizers or they did not understand the syntactic and semantic features of the relativizers they used They forgot that only relativizer whom from all the above ones could be selected in this case because whom standing after preposition with referred to the human head noun, The teacher The results in table also shows that relativizers where, zero relativizer, who and when were also problematic for the informants because the number of their wrong answers were high with twenty, nineteen, eighteen and thirteen accounting for 57.5 %, 47.5%, 45 % and 32.5 % respectively The least problematic relativizer was why with only wrong answers accounting for 5% This seems that the informants got familiar with why because the relativizer was often used after the head noun reason With the above discussion, we can easily see that the informants did not understand the semantic features as well as syntactic features of those relativizers or they did not understand the meaning or the referent of the head nouns, so they failed to use appropriate relativizers 2 Exercise From the information in summarized in table 2, this section discusses data collected from exercise of the test Table Relative clauses (N = 40) Number of Number of answers wrong answers 400 128 % 32% 30 Table shows the results of exercise undertaken by the forty informants of the study when they were asked to exercise about the use of relative clauses In exercise 2, forty informants were requested to combine two original sentences into a new one using relative clauses For example, ‘The student is from China He sits next to me’ The total number of the answers for exercise by forty informants was four hundred Exercise included ten questions Each question requested informants to combine a pair of original sentences into a new sentence using relative clauses (see Appendix 1) Table presents the results Accordingly, there were128 wrong answers accounting for 32% The results seem to indicate that many informants of the study produced the errors related to the use of relative clauses because they had poor understanding of the use of relative clauses For example, question of exercise requested the informants to combine two original sentences into a new one using relative clauses such as, 'The student is from China He sits next to me' For this question, many informants produced a sentence as follow: ‘The student is from China who sits next to me’ (Paper 18, 35…) The head noun in the above sentence was The student Following the general rules of English, the relative clauses should be placed immediately after the antecedent head nouns as in the following sentence: The student who sits next to me is from China’ The same mistake was repeated in question such as, ‘The lady called the police The lady’s wallet was stolen’ For this question, many informants produced a sentence as follow: ‘The lady called the police whose wallet was stolen.’ (Paper 39, 14…) The head noun in the above sentence was The lady Similarly, following the general rules of English, the relative clauses should be placed immediately after the antecedent head nouns as in the following sentence: ‘The lady whose wallet was stolen called the police’ The reason why the informants made those mistakes would be explained that the informants, on one hand, misused relative clauses because they did not identify which parts of the two original sentences had the same referent It means that they did not know what the antecedents of the relative clauses were, so they used relative clauses in wrong positions to modify wrong antecedents On the other hand, the informants committed these errors when the antecedent noun phrases containing the relative clauses were the subjects of the verbs in the main clauses 31 From this discussion, the sentences informants made were non-standard and literally nonsensical We can see that informants’ minds were confused about which part of the sentence to make a relative clause, and what the head noun to be modified by a relative clause In one word, informants committed these types of errors perhaps because they were short of back ground knowledge and poor understanding of syntactic features (especially the positions) as well as semantic features of relative clauses, which made them build the above meaningless sentences 2 Exercise This section discusses the use of restrictive and non-restrictive relatives by forty informants of the study Table would be the summary of the errors found in data of exercise Table Restrictive and Non-restrictive relatives (N = 40) Number of Number of answers wrong answers 400 224 % 56% Table shows the results of exercise which was undertaken by the forty informants of the study when they were requested to exercise about the choices between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses In exercise 3, forty informants were requested to recognize restrictive and non-restrictive relatives The total number of the answers for exercise by forty informants was four hundred Exercise consisted of ten questions Each question requested informants to identify restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses (see Appendix 1) As shown in table 6, 224 out of 400 answers were wrong accounting for 56 % The results 32 seem to indicate that informants gave wrong answers because they confused restrictive relatives with non-restrictive relatives and vice versa Firstly, the informants used commas in restrictive relative clause, with that as the relativizer For example, ‘When the school realized she was female, it withdrew its offer and Faulkner sued She engaged in a legal battle, that lasted several years but she finally won in 1995 The Citadel is no longer an all-male school’ (Paper 33, 21 …) Secondly, they used restrictive relative clauses after proper nouns For example, ‘Susan B Anthony who was born in New York is famous for her work in getting women the right to vote’ (Paper 34, 26 …) Finally, the informants used non-restrictive relative clauses with general antecedents For example, ‘She was a schoolteacher, who supported a woman's right to vote’ (Paper 27, 31…) From the above examples, we can see that the informants seem to confuse restrictive relative clauses with non-restrictive relative clauses because they did not clearly understand syntactic features as well as semantic features of relative clauses They could not identify whether the antecedents were proper nouns or general nouns, they did not know the meaning or referent of the antecedents, etc Also, they did not know how to punctuate sentences Therefore, the sentences they built were misunderstood or meaningless 33 PART C: CONCLUSION I Major findings In this paper, the thesis tried to analyze the common problems in using relative clauses in English of high school students in order to enable the learners to master the use of relative clauses in English and use them correctly, fluently and communicatively in their real life situations The errors made by the students were analyzed into three main categories, that is: the wrong use of relativizers, the misuse of the relative clauses, and the misuse of restrictive and non-restrictive relatives Firstly, in reference to the use of relativizers, most of the students failed to choose appropriate relativizers On one hand, the learners committed the error by using the human relativizers for non-human object (or vice versa) This reveals that they did not understand the semantic features of those relativizers or did not understand the meaning or the referent of the head nouns On the other hand, the students committed the other error by using the object relativizers for subject relativizers or adverbial relativizers, which shows that they did not understand the syntactic features of those relativizers As discussed in 2 1, that and which were the most problematic relativizers because the students made the most errors, the highest numbers of the wrong use of relativizers Secondly, in terms of the use of the relative clauses, students did not know which part of the sentence to make a relative clause, and what head noun to be modified by a relative clause Students committed these types of errors because they lacked back ground knowledge as well as understanding of syntactic features (especially the position) of relative clauses, which made them build the above meaningless sentences Finally, regarding the use of restrictive relative versus non-restrictive relative clauses, the reason why informants made those mistakes would be explained that they seem to confuse restrictive relative clauses with non-restrictive relative clauses and vice versa They did not clearly understand syntactic as well as semantic features of relative clauses Moreover, they could not realize whether the antecedents were proper nouns or general nouns, and they did not know the meaning of the antecedents In addition, they did not know how to punctuate sentences, etc 34 II Implications From the findings of the study, we can see that many of the errors were made because of students’ lack of back ground knowledge as well as understanding of the semantic and syntactic features of relative clauses Firstly, the findings of the study suggest that it is extremely important for teachers of English to teach students explicitly the rules how to make relative clauses in particular situations These grammar rules will help students to self correct when they make mistakes Secondly, teachers of English should pay much attention to using implicit activities along with explicit teaching Through implicit activities, students will learn not only the form and the meaning but also the use of the relative clauses Implicit activities are good guided practices For example: after introducing the forms and use of the relative clauses, teachers should give students authentic reading material such as a newspaper, magazine or reference book, and ask them to find out and underline the relative clauses and colour the relative pronouns Students should be supposed to determine to which head noun the relative pronoun refers This activity will help them to get used to the forms and use of the relative clauses and pronouns Guessing word games can also be used to practice relative clauses This can be done in small groups as well as the whole class One student will be given a list of the words and he or she is to explain them using relative clauses This helps students to use the language with the purpose of explaining words These activities can be modified in various types Students will find out the word through asking questions using relative clauses This activity can involve more students to practice relative clauses Finally, the findings of the study also suggest that informants should pay much attention to practising the use of relative clauses III Limitations and suggestions for further study Although the paper has accomplished the objectives set at beginning, the thesis cannot avoid some limitations The thesis cannot cover all the mistakes of high school students about relative clauses The research would therefore be restricted to their common 35 semantic and syntactic problems in using relative clauses in English and give some implications to those problems The target subjects of the study are also limited to 10th grade students Besides, my practical experience in teaching and knowledge of this field is limited; the suggestions to overcome difficulties are likely to be subjective In addition, problems in using relative clauses in English have no much found out The research will serve for further research on pragmatic problems in using relative clauses in English of high school students 36 REFERENCES Afar, Betty Scraper, Understanding and Using English Grammar, Prentice Hall Regent, 1989 Biber, Douglas; Johansson, Stag; Leech, Grammar; Conrad, Susan; Finnegan, E; And Quirk, Randolph, Long man Grammar Of Spoken And Written English, University College London, 1999 Chalkier, S, Current English Grammar, Macmillan Publisher Ltd, 1992 Delahunty, G.P; James, J.G, Language, Grammar and Communication, International Edition, 1994 Eastwood, John, Oxford Guild to English Grammar, Oxford University press, 1994 Green Baum, Sidney, English Grammar, Oxford University Press, 1996 Halliday, M.A.K (1994), Introduction to Functional Grammar, Edward Arnold, London Jacob, R.A, English Syntax, Oxford University Press, 1995 Leech, Grammar; Quirk, R; Green Baum, S; Static, J, A Grammar of Contemporary English, Long man Buckles And London, 1980 10 Leech, G and Static, J; A Communicative Grammar of English, Long man Singapore Publishers, Ltd, 1990 11 Newbrook, Mark, Relative Clauses, Relative Pronouns And Hong Kong English, Department of Languages City Polytechnic of Hong Kong ( http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkjo/view/45/4500090.pdf) 12 Quirk, R and Green Baum, S, A University Grammar of English, Long man group Ltd, 1987 13 Regmi, Dan Raj, Teaching Relative Clauses at Secondary Level (http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/NELTA/article/download/4657/3869) 14 Richards, Jack; Platt, John; Weber, Heidi, Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics, the Chaucer Press, 1985 15 Seely, Daniel & Grondona, Veronica (2006), Arabic vs English Relative Clauses: Cross-Linguistic Overview With reference to difficulties of relative clauses’ acquisition for saudi learners 16 Steer, Jocelyn, The Advance Grammar Book, Heinle & Heinle Pubplishers 37 17 Thao, Le Thi Hien (2007) Relative clauses in English and in Vietnamese – a systemic functional comparison, M.A minor thesis MA Thesis Vietnam National University College of Foreign Languages 18 Thomson, A.J, Martinet, A V, A Practical English Grammar, 1998 19 Thompson, G (1996), Introducing Functional Grammar, Edward Arnold, London) 20 Yule, G , Explaining English Grammar, Oxford University Press, 1998 I APPENDIX Survey Test Exercise The following questions have four choices marked a, b, c and d Circle the letter of the correct choice: Let me see all the letter…………….you have written a who b which c that d zero Mr Brown, ………….is only 34, is the director of this company a who b whose c which d that I know a place…………roses grow in abundance a which b who c whom d where The teacher with………… we studied last year no longer teaches in our school a which b who c whom d whose We saw so many soldiers and tanks……… were moving to the front a who b whom c which d that The man son has just passed the entrance examination is very rich a whom b whose c that d who We first went to Edinburgh, ………… is the capital of Scotland a where b who c that d which She told the police the time she had met him a which b whose c that d when She doesn't tell the reason .she avoids meeting me a whom b why c which d who Exercise Join the pairs of sentences using relative clauses The student is from China He sits next to me ……………………………………………………………………………………………… I saw a lot of people and horses They went to market ……………………………………………………………………………………………… This is my beloved school I studied in this school when I was young ……………………………………………………………………………………………… I recently went back to Paris It was still as beautiful as a pearl ……………………………………………………………………………………………… II The work appeared in 1957 The work started the revolution ……………………………………………………………………………………………… You didn’t tell us the reason We have to cut down our daily expenses for that reason ……………………………………………………………………………………………… The lady called the police The lady’s wallet was stolen ……………………………………………………………………………………………… The days were the saddest ones I lived far from home on those days ……………………………………………………………………………………………… The man is the accountant I’m talking to you about him ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 10 She kissed him twice This surprised everybody ……………………………………………………………………………………………… Exercise Read the following sentences and identify the underlined clause as R (restrictive) or NR (nonrestrictive) Insert commas where necessary Example NR Hillary Clinton, who was the First Lady in 1995, attended a women's conference in Beijing Susan B Anthony who was born in N.Y is famous for her work in getting women the right to vote She was a schoolteacher who supported a woman's right to vote Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the other founder of the National Woman Suffrage Association which was instrumental in changing the laws about women's suffrage Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman who graduated from a medical school in the United States She was not accepted by her teachers and later she was rebuffed by her friends who all ostracized her Eventually, she finished her coursework; she was the student who got the highest grades in her class She opened a hospital in New York The hospital which was run by women later expanded to become a medical school III When Shannon Faulkner applied in 1993 for acceptance to The Citadel which is a state-supported military school in Charleston, South Carolina she did not indicate that she was female The school which was all-male until 1995 did not ask if an applicant was male or female at the time because only men were allowed in the school 10 When the school realized she was female, it withdrew its offer and Faulkner sued She engaged in a legal battle that lasted several years but she finally won in 1995 The Citadel is no longer an all-male school IV APPENDIX Survey Test Suggested answers Part A The following questions have four choices marked a, b, c and d Mark the letter of the correct choice: d zero a who d where c whom d that b whose d which d when b why Part B Join the pairs of sentences using relative clauses The student who sits next to me is from China I saw a lot of people and horses that went to market This is my beloved school where I studied when I was young I recently went back to Paris, which was still as beautiful as a pearl The work which started the revolution appeared in 1957 You didn’t tell us the reason why we have to cut down our daily expenses The lady whose wallet was stolen called the police The days when I lived far from home were the saddest ones The man who/whom/ (about) whom I’m talking to you (about) is the accountant 10 She kissed him twice, which surprised everybody Part C Read the following sentences and identify the underlined clause as R (restrictive) or NR (nonrestrictive) Insert commas where necessary Example NR Hillary Clinton, who was the First Lady in 1995, attended a women's conference in Beijing V NR - Susan B Anthony, who was born in N.Y., is famous for her work in getting women the right to vote R - She was a schoolteacher who supported a woman's right to vote NR - Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the other founder of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which was instrumental in changing the laws about women's suffrage NR - Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman, who graduated from a medical school in the United States R - She was not accepted by her teachers and later she was rebuffed by her friends who all ostracized her R - Eventually, she finished her coursework; she was the student who got the highest grades in her class R - She opened a hospital in New York The hospital which was run by women later expanded to become a medical school NR - When Shannon Faulkner applied in 1993 for acceptance to The Citadel, which is a state-supported military school in Charleston, South Carolina, she did not indicate that she was female R - The school which was all-male until 1995 did not ask if an applicant was male or female at the time because only men were allowed in the school 10 R - When the school realized she was female, it withdrew its offer and Faulkner sued She engaged in a legal battle that lasted several years but she finally won in 1995 The Citadel is no longer an all-male school ... OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES - - TRỊNH ĐÌNH LAN Semantic and syntactic problems in using relative clauses in English of Yendinh high school. .. school in Yendinh Research question As it has been stated, this study was carried out to provide insights into the areas of semantic and syntactic problems in using relative clauses in English of Yendinh. .. Yendinh high school students Thus, it was designed in an attempt to seek answers to the following question: What problems in using English relative clauses in terms of semantics and syntactics high