A Probe Into The Underproduction And Errors Of English Relative Clauses By Chinese College Students

The relative clause is a very important structure in English and it has been studied from different angles in the literature. However, few studies are made from an overall perspective, and even fewer studies examine Chinese speakers'acquisition of English relative clauses by means of a multifactor theory. Besides, the English proficiency level is rarely taken as a parameter in investigating ESL or EFL learners'acquisition of English relative clauses. Moreover, the discussion about whether ESL or EFL learners avoid using English relative clauses never ceases. What's more, the specific influence of language universal properties on Chinese speakers'English relative clause acquisition needs to be examined.Based on the transfer theory, the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, the Error Analysis, relative clause formation strategies, the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy and the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis, the study probes into the use of English relative clauses by three different proficiency levels of Chinese college students so that some pedagogical implications may be provided for the teaching and learning of English relative clauses. This study is an empirical research. The subjects in this study, who are 112 Chinese college students and 43 English native college students, are randomly chosen. Four elicitation methods (the composition task, the multiple choice test, the grammaticality judgment test and the sentence combining test) are adopted to gather genuine data from the Chinese subjects. As for the native students, only composition corpus is collected.Comparisons both between the native students and the Chinese students, and between different levels of Chinese students, are made. Data from the subjects are analyzed via the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).The results of the study have confirmed all the hypotheses of the study. To begin with, the Chinese college students do use fewer English relative clauses on the composition task compared with the native students, which is compatible with the findings of some previous researchers. The reason is not"avoidance"as is claimed by some researchers. The phenomenon of"avoidance"is denied by the researcher of the present study for the term"avoidance"itself is problematic and whether it exists as a learning strategy is still disputable. Indeed, the Chinese students resort to some strategies such as simplification and structural conversion when anticipating difficulties in using relative clauses. Next, the underproduction and various errors found in the Chinese students'corpora are attributed to three reasons: interlingual factors, intralingual factors and language universal properties, each of which has been analyzed and discussed in detail. Then, the universal hypothesis—the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy is partly supported by the results of the study, always with the genitive position and sometimes with the object of a preposition as exceptions. The former exception has been found by some previous researchers, while the latter has never been reported in any previous study. It seems to imply that the object of a preposition is more easily relativized than the indirect object position in English relative clauses, which needs to be further studied and confirmed. Finally, the English proficiency level is proved to be an important parameter in the use of English relative clauses by the Chinese college students. It not only influences the number of relative clauses the students use, but also determines the variety of relative clauses and the number and variety of errors they make. But the influence is not balanced among different levels of students. The proficiency level has an effect on L1 transfer and the effect diminishes with the increase of the proficiency level. The proficiency level also influences the learners'use of learning strategies. The lower the proficiency level of the students is, the more frequently the strategies are used.The study can enrich the literature on the acquisition of ESL and EFL learners'English relative clauses. The findings and suggestions made in the study will benefit the English teaching in China. The application of the research to teaching is helpful to textbook compilers, teachers and learners. Textbook compilers can compile textbooks reasonably according to the Chinese learners'acquisition order; teachers can try every means to design exercises and classroom activities in order to find out in what aspects the learners are still weak and modify the teaching approaches accordingly; the learners can benefit a lot from the modification of the textbook and teaching approaches and proceed fast to the final acquisition.