A Corpus-based Study On The Acquisition Of Relative Clauses In Written English By Chinese Learners

In the past three decades,relative clauses(RCs)have attracted wide attention of researchers with their unique recursive features in syntactic analysis and language processing.In recent years,most empirical studies at home and abroad focused on the verification of different hypotheses of second language acquisition of relative clauses.Most studies supported the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis(NPAH)and the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis(PDH),and some studies provided evidence for a complementary relationship between accessibility and embeddedness.At present,the comparative study of the relative clauses produced by Chinese English learners and English native speakers based on corpus is very limited.The specific research questions are set as follows:1.What are the distribution features on the use of relative clauses of EFL learners in China?2.Compared with English native speakers,what is the tendency of the use of relative clauses by Chinese students?3.Do the acquisition orderings of RC from Chinese students and Native speakers support the hypotheses of NPAH,PDH,and SOHH?What are the potential factors?Therefore,this study used the data of two corpora and conducted a comparative study based on them.The author would use SWECCL(Chinese Learner's Spoken and Written English Corpus)and LOCNESS(Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays)to explore the use of RCs in the first and second grades of Chinese English majors and English native students in the untimed composition.Furthermore,the author also tried to validate the correctness of NPAH,PDH and SO Hierarchy Hypothesis(SOHH).In this study,all RCs were first searched by using AntConc3.2.1,and an independent sample T test was used to observe the differences in results.The results showed that 1.Chinese students and English native speakers produced SO RCs most frequently.In both types of data,there was no Chinese student,British or American student produced any IO,OCMP type of relative clauses.This may due to the influence of the theme of their work.2.In addition,in terms of the density of each RCs produced,Chinese students used relative clauses more frequently than English native speakers.The two were very different in terms of word count and length.English native speakers were good at writing long and complicated sentences,but this did not mean that they can write more relative clauses than Chinese English majors.3.The results of this study fully supported the NPAH hypothesis and PDH,and partially supported SOHH.Accessibility and embeddedness were interrelated in a complementary relationship.According to the results,we recommend that English teachers should adopt effective teaching methods to improve their understanding of language communication skills,so that they could use language in a better way and improve their communication skills.For example,it is easy to overcome the difficulty through the study of difficult types of relative clauses.In addition,we also recommend that in order to improve language skills,students should understand the grammatical differences between Chinese and English.