A Study Of Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses By Senior Middle School Students

Relative Clause (RC) is an important grammatical item in English grammar. It is one ofthe key points for English learners to study. Meanwhile, Relative Clause is also a hot issue forthe research of linguistics and second language acquisition. Most of the studies on acquisitionsequence of relative clauses focus on two aspects: one is embedded positions of a relativeclause, including two positions of the matrix subject position and the matrix object position;the other is types of relative clauses, such as subject (SU), direct object (DO), indirect object(DO), genitive (GEN), object of preposition (OPREP), and object of comparison (OCOMP).Through the matching of two embedded positions and six types, we can get twelve types ofrelative clauses: the relative sentence in which a subject relative clause is attached to thesubject of the main clause (SS), the relative sentence in which a direct object relative clause isattached to the subject of the main clause (SO), the relative sentence in which an indirectobject relative clause is attached to the subject of the main clause (SIO), the relative sentencein which a genitive relative clause is attached to the subject of the main clause (SGEN), therelative sentence in which an object of preposition relative clause is attached to the subject ofthe main clause (SOPREP), the relative sentence in which an object of comparison relativeclause is attached to the subject of the main clause (SOCOMP), the relative sentence patternin which a subject relative clause is attached to the object of the main clause (OS), the relativesentence pattern in which a direct object relative clause is attached to the object of the mainclause (OO), the relative sentence pattern in which an indirect object relative clause isattached to the object of the main clause (OIO), the relative sentence pattern in which agenitive relative clause is attached to the object of the main clause (OGEN), the relativesentence pattern in which an object of preposition relative clause is attached to the object ofthe main clause (OOPREP), the relative sentence pattern in which the object of comparisonrelative clause is attached to the object of the main clause (OOCOMP).Researchers abroad have put forward different hypotheses for the acquisition sequence ofrelative clauses from different perspectives. The present study is to study two embeddedpositions and six types of relative clauses based on the previous researches. It mainly focuseson two perspectives of comprehension and production. The subjects of the present study are60students from Senior2in a High School. Two instruments are grammatical judgment testand sentence combination test. Data are collected for analysis with the help of the StatisticalPackage of Social Science (SPSS13.0). Compared with the four main hypotheses, theresearch is to answer the following questions: 1. From the perspective of comprehension, what is the acquisition sequence of relativeclauses for senior high school students?2. From the perspective of production, what is the acquisition sequence of relativeclauses for senior high school students?The acquisition sequence results of12relative clauses are as follows:1. From the perspective of comprehension, the sequence of relative clauses for seniorhigh school students is:OO> OS> OIO> SS> OGEN>OOPREP> SOPREP>SIO> SO>SOGEN>OOCOMP> SOCOMP2. From the perspective of production, the sequence of relative clauses for senior highschool students is:OOPREP> OO> SOPREP> SS> OIO>OS>SO> OGEN/SGEN> OOCOMP/SIO> SOCOMP...