A Corpus-Based Study On English Relative Clauses In Chinese L2 Learners' Writings

The present study has conducted a corpus-based research of Chinese college students'use of English relative clauses (RCs) in their interlanguage based on the theories of Interlanguage(IL) and Error Analysis(EA). By doing the research, the author aims at finding out the frequency of different types of RCs and what kind of errors the students are most likely to make as well as the characteristics of the errors.The data used for this study are taken from three sub-corpora of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) which have been compiled mainly by Professor Gui Shichun and Professor Yang Huizhong. More than 2000 sentences have been chosen from the three sub-corpora as the study object to study the phenomenon of avoidance, and after that, manual division and sampling are conducted to pick out 207 RCs containing RC-related errors to study the frequency and characteristics of different types of errors. According to the division standard of "performance" and "competence" made by the American linguist N. Chomsky (1956), the author designs a test paper that is representative of the error sample of CLEC to group all the RC errors into two categories:competence errors and performance errors. To make it more specific, the errors in each category are re-divided into interlingual errors and intralinguial errors(Richards,1971). The causes for different types of errors are added at the end of each section.After the analysis, the author finds that:(1) There is a phenomenon of avoidance when the Chinese college students use English RCs headed by which, who, whom and where, but with the increase of the students'English proficiency levels, the avoidance phenomenon becomes less serious.(2) Among all the RCs sampled from CLEC,23.8% of them contain RC-related errors. Among all the RC-related errors,53% are performance errors and 47% are competence errors. To be more specific, Wrong Agreement, Improper Collocation and Disorganized Sentence Structure account for 60% of all the type of errors, therefore, the three types of errors should be the focus of classroom teaching and RC acquisition.(3) The errors are made because of the negative transfer both from the learners' mother tongue and the target language.Based on the research results of the study, the author concludes that performance errors equal competence errors in number and therefore cannot be ignored by the EFL learners as well as the teachers. Besides, the negative transfer resulted both from the learners'mother tongue and the target language plays an important role in the error-making.The major findings obtained from the present study have some pedagogical implications to both teaching and learning of English relative clauses. To start with, the present study sheds light on the recognition of the nature of RC avoidance. Secondly, performance errors are equal to competence errors in number, so great importance should be attached to both of the above two types of errors in classroom teaching and teachers are suggested to resort to IL corpora to find more regularities to aid their English language teaching and learning. Hopefully this study may complement the previous studies in this area.