On The Causes Of Variation In Chinese College English Learners' Interlanguage

It is common that second language learners vary their performances systematically in different situations when they are in an attempt to convey meanings in the target language. This kind of phenomenon is called interlanguage variation. A large body of empirical studies conducted within the frameworks of different approaches show that such variation is caused by multiple factors, which can be classified into two major groups: intra-linguistic factors and extra-linguistic factors. However, none of the existing approaches is adequate enough to account for all the proved factors, therefore, a new approach—the multi-factor approach has been proposed for this issue. Though there have been only a few studies conducted within the framework of this approach up to present, the findings of these studies are quite fruitful, which suggests that this approach is very powerful.It has been proved that the acquisition of English relative clauses is a hard task for second language learners, esp. for Chinese students. The study on the acquisition of relative clauses has been a hot topic in the field of Second Language Acquisition in recent years; however, few studies have ever focused on the variable production of English relative clauses by Chinese students. Therefore, the author decides to choose English relative clauses as the target language structure to probe into the phenomenon of variation in Chinese English learners'interlanguage.Within the framework of the multi-factor approach, the present research aims to investigate the effects of both intra-linguistic factors and extra-linguistic factors on the variable production of relative clauses by Chinese college English learners. Three specific factors were investigated in the research: the clause types, the syntactic functions of relative pronouns and the time pressure. Other factors apart from these...