An NPAH-Based Study Of Chinese College Students’Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses

As one core grammar in second language acquisition, English relative clause attaches great importance to research of second language acquisition and English teaching. In1977, Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, also short for NPAH, was put forth by Keenan&Comrie through cross-language studies of relative clauses in fifty languages. This universal implication of contemporary linguistic typology has been widely used to predict the acquisition order of English relative clauses in second language acquisition research, especially in research of European languages as second language acquisition.This current research dedicates to probe into the English major students’ acquisition order of English relative clause in China and testify the prediction of NPAH. In order to facilitate the research, two questionnaires are designed to examine the production knowledge and comprehension knowledge of thirty-five sophomores and thirty-one graduate students of the first year from English Department in Qingdao University. And the main research questions are presented as follows:(1) based on the productive data and comprehension data collected in this research, what is the order of English relative clauses acquisition of Chinese learners from English Department? Does it match NPAH theory?(2) What are those errors of English relative clauses acquisition in this research?(3) As to this research, are there any differences between sophomore students and Graduate students from English Department? What are those differences?The major findings of this research reveal that in production data, the acquisition orders of both sophomores and graduate students comply with the prediction of NPAH and antecedents serve as subject, object, complement and prepositional object in SU-, DO-, OPREP-and GEN-type relative clauses; in comprehension data, both the sophomores’ acquisition order of English relative clauses (SU>GEN>DO>OPREP) and graduate students’(GEN>SU>DO>OPREP) are basically consistent with NPAH except for the GEN-position.Besides, the results of this research about English relative clauses show that high error ratio relative clauses like need more practices in future English relative clauses teaching. Also, differences between English relative clauses and Chinese relative clauses are supposed to be understood well to alleviate the negative transfer of Chinese.This research attempts to explore the acquisition order of English major students from English Department of Chinese Universities, examine the prediction of NPAH with the results and provide pedagogical implications for future English relative clauses teaching. Because of the limited numbers of English major students, this research has its limitation. In future research, it is suggested to enlarge the numbers of participants and investigate studying abroad Chinese students’and even native speakers’ acquisition orders of English relative clauses.