The Features Of English Relative Clause Acquisition For Chinese Learners

English relative clause has always been regarded as one of the most useful but difficult points in second language acquisition for Chinese learners, due to its complex syntactic structure and the great difference between Chinese and English. which has attracted lots of researchers attention.Combined with the theory of language transfer, contrastive analysis, error analysis and Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, this experimental study aims to find out the specific influence of the mother tongue, target language system, language universal characteristics and other factors on the errors and phenomena appeared during their relative clause acquisition process, so as to investigate the features of English relative clause acquisition for Chinese learners with different language proficiency.There are 90 Chinese learners, representing three groups of different language proficiency, taking part in this study. Three data elicitation tasks are adopted in this study, including sentence translation, sentence combination and the questionnaire, the first two tasks of which are designed based on the seven kinds of grammatical roles played by relative pronouns or adverbs in the clause and one typical non-restrictive clause, in order to check the acquisition status more specifically among the different language proficient subjects, such as the errors they make, the reasons and the development trend of these errors, the acquisition difficulty order and the strategies adopted during the English relative clause production process. And the first task is to test the consciousness of producing English relative clause for Chinese learners without the clear instruction of using relative clause. In addition, the third task questionnaire aims to investigate the language distance in the minds of those subjects. Above all, the features of English relative clause acquisition for Chinese learners have been drawn out in the following findings:firstly, the main errors made by the Chinese learners include:wrong use of the relative pronouns or adverbs,resumptive pronouns,absence of the head noun, omitting the relative pronouns or adverbs,non-adjacency,omitting the preposition in OPREP and IO relative clauses.But with the improvement of learners' language proficiency,the total amount of errors will decrease a lot.Secondly,the acquisition difficulty order for Chinese learners with different language proficiency summarized in this study is not exactly in accordance with NPAH,with GEN and OPREP as the exception.And the clauses led by relative adverbs seem to be easier to be mastered than real OPREP for Chinese learnerThirdly,avoidance and relative clause transformation are the strategies adopted by the learners to make up the lack of the proficient use of those diffi(?) and (?)familiar relative cluase structures for them so as to make sure the correctness of production.Fourthly,the relative clause acquisition process is affected by factor of the (?) language.se(?)ond language,lan(?) (?)versal features and the learners (?) elves (?) the (?) of learners' language (?)ficie(?) the (?) (?) oecome fess and less.The above findings can provide some beneficial implications for effective English relative clause teaching and acquisition in China.