An Empirical Study Of Language Transfer In Chinese Students' Learning Of English Relative Clauses

Language transfer has long had a unique place in the research of linguistics and second language acquisition. In this thesis, the author tries to examine English relative clause learning in Chinese context in the light of Language Transfer Theory.An empirical study is conducted to find out the characteristics of Chinese students'English relative clause learning and to see how the students'native language influences the learning process. For the sake of convenience, it only focuses on Chinese students'learning of five types of English relative clauses, namely, subject (SU), direct object (DO), object of preposition (OPREP), genitive (GEN) and object of comparative (OCOMP). Results from the two tests (one Sentence Combination Test and the other Grammatical Judgment Test) generate the following findings:First, Chinese students'learning of English relative clauses follows such a developmental route as"SU>GEN>OCOMP>DO>OPREP". This special order is subject to the influence of a variety of factors, among which native language transfer is the most influential. Second, most of the common types of errors in the students'relative clause use, such as resumptive pronouns, erroneous use of relative pronouns or prepositions, and redundant relative clauses, etc. may be ascribed to L1 influence. Third, avoidance is a common phenomenon in Chinese students'English relative clause use. The most frequently avoided relative clause types are OCOMP, OPREP and DO. The major reason for the avoidance is again language transfer. Fourth, students with a higher language proficiency level perform better than those with a lower proficiency level.