This paper investigates Korean learners' comprehension pattern of English relative clauses. Also Korean learners' general principle for interpretation of English complex sentences as L2 is discussed. Though, for the native speakers' general principle, Conjoined-clause strategy, Left-to-Right strategy and Functional Principle are argued in linguistic literatures, none of them is fully supported by Korean learners' data. Thirty High School students and sixty college students were tested in the experimental tests. As the results of de Villiers et al.(1979), Korean adult learners have shown the order of comprehension, as SS > OO > OS > SO type, and the number of possible candidates of the gap in relative clauses, not just the distance, has made them difficult to comprehend. To see the distribution of the relative clauses in Korean textbooks, I have investigated two High School textbooks. Both the amount and the diversity of relative clause types seem not to reflect Korean learners' developmental process properly.

• Jaemin Kim(Chonbuk National University)