Application Of Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses To Comprehensive English Classroom Activity

The relative clause has always been considered one of the most important constructions inEnglish which has been studied by many researchers for a long time. Besides, many relatedtheories and hypotheses are proposed to testify the principles and the difficulty of processingEnglish relative clauses of different types from different perspectives. However, few of thesestudies have been applied to guide the comprehensive English teaching, esp. the conducting ofclassroom activities, and even few studies have been carried out to improve the output of thelearners’ both oral and written English by applying the acquisition of English relative clauses toEnglish teaching. What’s more, the relation between the improvement of the output of Englishrelative clauses and English proficiency is rarely tested.Based on the Transfer Theory, the Comparative Analysis Hypothesis, the Error Analysis, theNoun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy as well as the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis, the presentstudy explores the errors and the order of difficulty in processing the English relative clauses andhow to apply those findings to the comprehensive English teaching, esp. the classroom activitiesto improve the English proficiency of the English majors. In addition, some pedagogicalimplications are provided for the teaching and learning of comprehensive English.This study is an empirical research. The author selected29and27students respectively fromtwo parallel classes of English majors of2011in the Foreign Language School of ShandongUniversity of Technology, and then a teaching experiment lasting for17weeks is conducted inthe two classes (one is the experimental group, and the other the control group). Four elicitationmethods (the multiple choice test, the composition task, the oral presentation test and the classobservation) are adopted to gather genuine data from the subjects. Data from the subjects areanalyzed via the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).The major findings of the study are:1) By applying the Language Transfer and the CAH,the error categories and causes can be predicted and the order of the difficulty in relativizingthe English RCs can be implied by the NPAH and the PDH;2) By applying the acquisition of theEnglish RCs to the design of the classroom activities in comprehensive English, the learners’output of English RCs on both oral and written aspects has been improved;3) the learners’English proficiency has been greatly enhanced. According to the findings of the research, the author correspondingly put forward somesuggestions on the application of the acquisition of English RCs to comprehensive Englishclassroom activities, and pointed out the limitations of this research and suggestions for thefuture study.