Avoidance Phenomenon Of Relative Clause In Written Output

Relative clause is an important grammatical item in encoding recursion in English，research of this device from different angles has taken a prominent part in second languageacquisition studies in past five decades. However, Chinese L2 learners have difficulties inlearning English relative clauses on account of the formal and functional distinctions betweenthe two languages. Researchers noticed that Chinese learners produce little English relativeclauses in spontaneous output both in spoken and written English, so do the concomitanterrors, though many years have been devoted to English learning. Some SLA researchersdefined this underproduction as avoidance phenomenon caused by great distinctions betweentwo languages and learners’anxiety of making mistakes. According to second languageacquisition, avoidance as a communication strategy is regarded helpful if it is usedappropriately. However, overusing of this strategy will interfere the expanding of newknowledge in L2 learning and even cause interlanguage fossilization.Nevertheless, there exist opponents of the term“avoidance phenomenon”who deniedthe existence of avoidance and took the underproduction of English relative clauses as a resultof low proficiency of relevant knowledge. Dispute about this term has not been eliminatedsince the appearance of the term in 1974. This research is designed to validate the existence ofavoidance phenomenon in Chinese college students’written output by a series of validatingtasks, and detailed distributions of different avoidance strategies showed by collected data aredemonstrated as well. At last, effective methods to reduce avoidance are proposed andconducted in the present study, providing pedagogical implications and valuable suggestions for further research.The participants in the study are two classes of non-English major in Grade One andGrade Three in Shanxi Normal University. Totally five tasks are involved in the study, whichare conducted in two times according to the following order: translation test and compositiontask of no specific requirements for the first time, sentence combining test, translation test andcomposition task with particular requirements for the second time. The two translation testsare of the same questions but with different directions while the two compositions are oftotally different titles and directions.Test questions in sentence combining test and translation tasks are designed by theauthor after referring previous study and grammars. The sentences to be produced are of sixtypes according to the relative clause acquisition order proposed on Noun Phrase AccessibilityHierarchy (NPAH). The relative clauses involved in the study include subject relative clause(SU), direct object relative clause (DO), indirect object relative clause (IO), object ofpreposition relative clause (OPREP), genitive relative clause (GEN) and object of comparisonrelative clause (OCOMP).Results of the five tasks are scored and recorded carefully, after which percentage termsand descriptive statistical method with the help of SPSS (Statistical Package for SocialSciences), Version 17 is employed to analyze the collected data and obtain a scientificconclusion in statistics meaning. The major findings based on the analysis are as follows:First of all, the college students do avoid using relative clause in the written production,and the frequency of avoidance strategies varied according to subjects’proficiencies andrelative clause types tested.Secondly, the acquisition order reflected by the accuracy rate of each test differsbetween different groups and different tasks. But all the acquisition orders are not strictlysame as what has been predicted by NPAH.Lastly, language transfer and students’anxiety together function in the underproductionof relative clauses. Encouraging measurements such as changing scoring standard andignoring vocabulary mistakes in practicing grammatical structures have positive effect insecond language teaching.