An Empirical Research On The EFL Learners’Writing Errors In Relative Clauses

With the development of the linguistic theories, the focus of the foreign language teaching shifted from teachers to learners, and the language errors made by the students become the objects that the scholars research and analyze. As a major part in teaching of writing, error analysis is what the experts and scholars devote to research."Error analysis is the process of determining the incidence, nature, causes and consequences of unsuccessful language"(James,2001:1).During the process of learning English, the acquisition and application of the relative clauses (RCs) are always the thorny points in second language acquisition (SLA). To some degree, the comprehension and production of English RCs reflect the learners’English proficiency. The differences between English RCs and Chinese attributives and the complexity of English RCs make the students face difficulties in acquiring and using them. By using corpus-collecting, questionnaire, and sampling interview, the study bases on the theories of error analysis (EA), contrastive analysis (CA) and discourse analysis (DA), meanwhile text errors concerning RCs in students’writing are analyzed.Learners make errors in both language comprehension and production. L2learners are not alone in making errors. Children learning their first language (L1) also make "errors".(Ellis,1999) This study discusses the errors appear in the acquisition and production of non-English majors. By corpus-collecting papers and giving questionnaires,100valid papers are got from106students. And120valid questionnaires are collected from106students and20teachers. To some extent, this shows the J. College students’acquisition and production level of RCs. According to the grammar of RCs, in order to find out the distribution and frequency, text errors are sorted out and analyzed from practical application due to grammar knowledge relevant to the RCs. Thereafter error sources, i.e. the causes of errors are analyzed furthermore according to the following categories: interlingual interference, intralingual interference, cultural interference, communicative strategies, cognition and personality, induced errors, etc.(Yang Lianrui&Zhang Delu, 2007) According to the analysis to the100students’ composition writing in the final exam given in January2013, it is found that the production paucity in using RC is obvious. According to the statistics and analysis, basing on the collected corpus of the students from the two countries-China&the US, the analysis on the paucity of RCs is given. Finally a conclusion is presented:the loose structure, lacking unity, coherence and logic in Chinese students’English writing partially result from the paucity of RC. Then sampling interview is given to20students and6teachers for further discussion of the causes and it shows that some students do consciously avoid using RCs while some others subconsciously underproduce RCs. The phenomenon of Chinese learners’non-use of RCs cannot be attributed entirely to language background because language proficiency also plays an essential role.At last, some implications are drawn from this study for the strategies of improving the production quality of RCs, carrying out the relevant teaching strategies and improving the writing level.