L2 Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses By Chinese College Students

A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or pronoun. It is one of the most important sentence structures in English teaching and learning. During the last four decades, the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) has played an important role both in linguistic and psycholinguistic research. This issue has been studied extensively by lots of researchers working on both first language acquisition and second language acquisition (SLA). A lot of hypotheses have been put forward to account for the acquisition of English relative clauses, especially on the ease or difficulty of processing and acquiring different types of RCs. So far, few empirical studies have been conducted to examine the Chinese English learners' processing difficulty of English RCs in Chinese context.This study was designed to investigate the acquisition of RCs by Chinese college students of different proficiency levels in Chinese context, including the difficulty orders and the possible reasons. In this research, we Carried out an empirical study and attempted to answer the following two key research questions: What order of difficulty do Chinese college students follow in their acquisition of English RCs? And which of the three hypotheses, NPAH, PDH and SOHH, accounts for such orders?We designed a grammaticality judgment task consisting of 96 target sentences incorporating three sets of RCs. One set is from Diessel & Tomasello's six RCs (right—embedded); another is miscellaneous four RCs (center-embedded) and the third out of the four main RC types (SS, SO, OS, OO). Each target sentence shows either grammatical or ungrammatical use of English RCs.Four groups of college students (total number: 135), representing three levels of English proficiency, participated in the study. They were 38 freshmen majoring in education in Shaanxi Institute of Education (Pre-Intermediate), 35 English-major sophomores from PeiHua Institute (IntermediateⅠ),32 non-English-major postgraduates of grade one from ShaanXi Normal University (IntermediateⅡ) and 30 English-major postgraduates also from Shaanxi Normal University (Advanced). Their proficiency level was determined by an English Language Skills Assessment test. The results show that, firstly, the students' acquisition order of the relative clauses supports the NPAH to a very large extent; the PDH and SOHH were almost not borne out. Secondly, Advanced group was more accurate than any other groups, IntermediateⅡwas more accurate than IntermediateⅠand Pre-intermediate, but the latter two lower groups were simply not different in their judgment of well-formed and ill-formed RCs, which confirming our hypothesis that beginning students have more difficulties with RCs, and the more experience with English they gain, the better they will perform in the acquisition of English RCs. Finally, learners are more likely to accept the resumptive pronouns in DO, IO and OBL positions because of L1 transfer. We also found that all groups except Advanced group tended to accept the ill-formed OO strongly. Our findins are discussed in light of similarity to simple sentences, distance between filler and gap, word order theory, L1 transfer, frequency and referent.The findings of this study bear implications to EFL. The teaching of relative clauses should follow the guidance of linguistic universals such as the NPAH as well as markedness theory. Systematic teaching is very helpful for students to make great progress and go through each development stage smoothly. Students should be to encourage to make more frequent use of different types of RC structure.