An Investigation Of The Chinese Middle School Students' Learning And Acquisition Of English And Chinese Relative Clauses

A relative clause (RC) is a subordinate clause, consisting of a relativized noun (or noun phrase) and a restricting clause. It is used to modify this noun (or noun phrase). As it is a common as well as complex linguistic phenomenon in all languages, the researches in this regard have attracted increasing attention in both L1 and L2 at home and abroad. Researches abroad have made great achievements while researches at home are not fruitful. Previous studies mainly focus on children's acquisition of RCs in L1 and adults' acquisition of RCs in L2. However, few studies are devoted to the researches into the comparative study of English and Chinese RCs. In these researches, college students are more frequently chosen as subjects for their study than the middle school students, who are at the preliminary stage of RCs learning or acquisition.The present study focuses on the investigation of the Chinese middle school students'English RCs learning and Chinese RCs acquisition. Using the well-designed testing papers, we investigate the status quo of the Chinese middle school students' learning and acquisition of different RCs. Separate accessibility hierarchies are obtained in association with the different tasks' performances. The hierarchies are compared with Keenan & Comrie's (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy so as to reveal how the Chinese middle school students process English RCs and Chinese RCs.Four RC types are examined in the present study, including the extraction of subject relative clause (SU), object relative clause (DO), indirect object relative clause (10) and prepositional object relative clause (OBL). Two groups of data are analyzed, which are collected from a test for two middle school classes, representing two Linguistic proficiency levels. Readjusted from Eckman et al's (1988) design, the testing materials in this study consist of five tasks about RCs:English sentence combination task, Chinese sentence combination task, English multiple choice task, English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation task and Chinese-English translation task.The statistic analysis of the testing indicates that the accessibility hierarchies investigated in five tasks, to a large extent, follow the order predicted by NPAH. Moreover, SU is largely highest on the accessibility hierarchy. More mistakes in 10 are found than in other RC types, for both groups' English sentence combination task and the junior group's Chinese sentence combination task. However, the students'performances in other tasks indicate that DO is highest on the accessibility hierarchy. In addition, it is discovered that different verb types affect the difficulties of RCs processing in the sentences involving the same RC type, like SU with an intransitive verb is easier to process than SU with a ditransitive verb. The analysis demonstrates that as a whole, the high linguistic proficiency group perform better than the low linguistic proficiency group in nearly all the tasks despite the fact that there is no significant difference in the Chinese sentence combination task. Furthermore, the results in Task Five show that the low linguistic proficiency group prefer to retain resumptive pronouns in IO and OBL more than the high linguistic proficiency group.Our major findings can be concluded as follows:(1) our study further demonstrates that NPAH is linguistically universal in a large degree; (2) partial disagreement with NPAH is in DO's and IO's positions on the accessibility hierarchies in some tasks; (3) the factors affecting RC processing are verb types, linguistic proficiencies and linguistic transfer of resumptive pronouns; (4) Chinese EFL learners show great agreement in the RCs hierarchy tendency with English native speakers, apart from the one case in IO.The present study provides important implications for the instruction of the Chinese middle school students'English RCs and the complex syntactic structures like RCs. English RCs should be instructed according to the order of processing difficulty and take into consideration verb types and linguistic transfer of resumptive pronouns.