Typological Influence On Chinese Learners On Their Avoidance Of English Relative Clauses

English as a second language in China, relative clauses have drawn much attention in the field of second language acquisition, and due to its high frequency and usefulness in our daily communication and the complexity in the process of producing relative clauses. And relative clauses are always a hot topic studied by researchers. However, for Chinese college students, it is difficult for them to produce relative clauses accurately because of their complex construction and the different structural configuration between English and Chinese. So the avoidance of using relative clauses by Chinese learners is pervasive in their second language acquisition(SLA) process, which greatly puzzles many Chinese English educators. This paper attempts to investigate the avoidance that occurred in Chinese college students' production of English relative clauses and to explore the relationship between the avoidance phenomenon and typological markedness. The present study of avoidance of Chinese college students in using relative clauses is of special significance.The data were obtained from 120 English major students in four classes from Shanxi Normal University. Two of them are Grade One and another two are Grade Three. These four classes were identified as four groups, namely, Grade1 Group 1(G1G1), GradelGroup2 (G1G2), Grade3Group1(G3G1), and Grade3Group2 (G3G2). The materials used in the study are a Chinese-English sentence translation test. The test contains 20 sentences containing relative clauses the author found from English magazines like China Daily, 21st Century and so on. Among them, six types of relative clauses are included: subject relative clause (SU), direct object relative clause (DO), indirect object relative clause (IO), object of preposition relative clause (OP), genitive relative clause (GE) and object of comparative relative clause (OC). The 20 items were arranged randomly in the test and students were given 20 minutes to complete them. Moreover, two different directions were designed to for the participants. The first two groups are asked to translate the following Chinese sentences into complex English sentences; and the other two groups were asked to translate the following sentences into complex English sentences with a relative clause. The findings are:Firstly, the Chinese college students do resort to avoidance strategy in the process of relative clauses acquisition. The learners' acquisition is under the influence of first language factors, target language factors and learning strategies.Secondly, the learners' avoidance corresponds to the NPAH, reflecting degree of typological markedness to some extent, but not strictly. And the acquisition order of the different groups is not the same.Thirdly, there do exist some other factors accounting learners' avoidance behavior. In this paper, the psychotypology is an important one. Psychotypology, a perceived language distance, does influence the learners' avoidance behavior to some extent.