A Study Of Interlanguage Features Of Chinese Secondary School Students-An Empirical Study On The Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses

Interlanguage (IL) study is an important branch in SLA enquiry. It provides important information about the process of language learning and enriches our understanding of the nature of SLA. The IL researches shed much insight on the language pedagogy. Teachers can better adjust their teaching by a clear picture of the students' IL development.The study of Chinese students' IL features is the theme of this research. Based on the theoretical claims and empirical research findings, this study investigates the free writings of 300 senior high students from different grades and schools of different levels. The use of relative clauses is examined to find out the acquisition features: how often do students use relative clauses in the writing? And why? How often do they make mistakes? What kind of acquisition order can be reflected? A concordance is employed to count such basic statistics as frequency..., etc.The research findings are presented as follows: the use of relative clauses by these students is quite limited since such syntactic structures are still quite difficult for them. The use of relative clauses may be influenced by the writing task. If task instruction contains a relative clause, the students may imitate and so the use of such structure increases. The task type may also be a variable influencing the use of relative clauses. It is found that the uses of relative clauses are quite limited under free writing tasks, while the uses may be encouraged under guided writing tasks withspecific instruction on the topic. Such a relationship is quite mysterious and needs more researches. The students don't quite often make mistakes in using relative clauses partly because they seldom use such structures. Among the mistakes, pronoun retention occurs frequently resulting from the LI influence. The omission of aux-be is also quite common which is believed to be linguistic simplification. Other errors are found in the use of relative pronouns "who", "whom" and "whose", and relative adverb "why" and "where". The strategy of simplification can explain the causes of such errors. The basic acquisition order reflected is that the right branching relative clauses are easier to process or acquire than the center embedded relative clauses. Kuno's Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis (PDH) best predicts the acquisition order of the students.Yet, since some limitations exist as to the data collected, the generalization of the result achieved needs to be validated. In addition, further longitudinal researches are needed.