A thesis submetted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree "Licence en langues et Littérature Anglaises"

RESUME

The use of any language is to communicate. The language is normally a tool and the channel through which thoughts and ideas are expressed. Learners fail to learn not only because of the inadequacy of the teaching methods, but also because of the sociolinguistic situation or the environment and therefore students make errors, especially those related to the relative clauses. This has pushed us to deal with those errors made by Burundi learners, mostly those from First Forms in the Arts Section.

The main purpose of our work is to look into errors made by Burundi learners in the use of relative clauses in order to kow exactly the problem thy face in their use. The choice of our topic was not random since we have seen that students from different levels do not master well the use relative clauses and then we found better to deal with them to reveal the difficulties encountered by First Forms in Arts Section Students in the use of relative clauses. Once the recommendations which are pointed out will be honored, we hope that the feedback will be fruitful, especially in the learning of the relative clauses.

This work has found out that most students from secondary schools, especially those from First Form in the Arts Section in the selected schools confuse the relative pronouns. They do not really make a difference between human and non human relative pronouns. The main problem is that they do not master their use and this has been observed through the diagnostic tests in which we found many errors related to the problem of choice of the correct relative pronoun to use that students made which needs a remedy.