A Case Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Acquisition Of Relative Clause

This present thesis intends to apply contrastive analysis (CA) to the study of Chinese college students' production of relative clauses and adopt error analysis to test whether the students' errors result from the differences between their native language (NL) and foreign language (FL) or from other factors.The thesis first introduces the background, purposes and organization of the research and gives a brief account of its theoretical bases, including contrastive analysis, error analysis and language transfer. Then the descriptions of English relative clauses are given. A contrastive analysis of relative clauses in English and Chinese are made from six aspects in chapter4. The most important part of this thesis is a case study in chapter5, including the purpose, subject selection, data collection, results and discussions. Through error analysis of 25 subjects' production of relative clauses, the writer tries to find out whether the methodology of contrastive analysis 'difference=difficulty=error' is valid or not in the present case study. To explain it clearly, this thesis is to find out whether or not the subjects will find difficulties where the two languages are different and thus will commit errors. In this endeavor, the contrastive analysis of English and Chinese relative clauses and the error analysis of the questionnaires will be of great value to both language learning and language teaching.