Main or Subordinate? An Exploratory Diagnosis of Clausal Hierarchy Confusion Among Thai EFL Undergraduates
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Abstract
Diagnostic exploration of syntactic analytical competencies in complex sentence analysis remains underexplored in EFL settings despite its importance to academic language proficiency. In this study, a diagnosis of the clause analysis proficiency of 200 Thai EFL undergraduates was conducted, using a purpose-designed clause analysis assessment (CAA) grounded in Burton-Roberts’s (2022) abbreviated clausal analysis (ACA) framework. The participants were administered the CAA and individually produced 1,400 sentence diagrams that were analyzed for procedural and conceptual error patterns using descriptive statistics and error frequency analysis. The average proficiency was found to be moderate (M = 18.2/35, SD = 4.8). Two patterns of errors were identified: (a) procedural errors related mainly to segmenting sentences into clauses (61.0%) and (b) a conceptual bottleneck involving main–subordinate clause confusion, accounting for 28.0% of clause-type misidentifications. This suggests that the participants faced not only surface-level procedural difficulty but also a systematic misrepresentation of the hierarchical structure of complex sentences. Therefore, in EFL syntax instruction, hierarchical clause awareness should be prioritized before moving on to sentence diagramming. Visual-syntactic scaffolding is also recommended to build learners’ conceptual understanding of main-subordinate clause relationships.
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