Abstract

The aim of the study was to examine the effect of explicit instruction by using phrase structure rules on acquisition of noun clauses functioning as a subject, an object of a verb and an object of the preposition since they are considered a complex structure that poses difficulty for students learning English. The participants were one class of 12th grade students studying at a secondary school in Surin, Thailand. The instruments used to collect the data were a pretest and posttest and a semi-structured interview. There were 16 training sessions. Each session was conducted within the 50-minute class period. The results of the tests showed that the explicit instruction using phrase structure rules helped improve the participants’ knowledge of noun clauses and helped the participants acquire noun clauses. The results of the semi-structured interview revealed that the participants’ opinions toward the explicit instruction using phrase structures rules were mostly positive. Many of them said that phrase structure rules helped them understand the structures and functions of noun clauses, which also helped improve their reading skills.

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