An Empirical Study On PACE Model

This present study investigated the effects of the PACE model on short-term learning of English relative clauses, and the participants’ attitudes towards the PACE model and the reasons for it. PACE is the abbreviation of Presentation, Attention, Co-construction and Extension. The study aims at answering four research questions.1) Among participants at three proficiency levels, are there any differences in the effects of the PACE model on the difficulty order of three types of relative clauses in acquisition among participants at three proficiency levels?2) Are there any differences in the effects of the PACE model on the types of errors?3) Are there any differences in the effects of the PACE model on the scores of the use of relative clauses in a context?4) What are the participants’ attitudes toward the PACE model?It was revealed that the PACE model helped high-level and intermediate-level participants make some improvement in the acquisition of DO, and low-level participants in the acquisition of OPREP. However, after being taught with the PACE model, high-level participants tended to make errors of non-adjacency (NON) while intermediate-level and low-level participants were more likely to make errors of pronoun retention (PR) or noun retention (NR). It was also found that after being taught with the PACE model, high-level and low-level participants similarly produced many relative clauses that contain any of the four error types, namely, PR, NON, inappropriate relative marker morphology (IM) and inappropriate omission of relative marker (10) in a context. However, intermediate-level participants produced many relative clauses containing omission of head noun or verb in the relative clause in a context. It was also discovered that most of the participants were in favor of the PACE model but some of them were not because of learner differences in intelligence, learning styles and learning preferences.This study contributes to how to apply the PACE model among learners at different proficiency levels and with learner differences in the Chinese secondary-level EFL context and therefore, contributes to grammar instruction.