A Study Of Senior High School Students’ Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses-from The Perspective Of Language Transfer

The English relative clause has drawn the attention of the linguists and scholarsin second language acquisition for a long time due to its importance and complexstructure. Since it is complex, it is a headache for L2learners, especially for ourChinese learners. We either make several mistakes on it or even avoid using it. Themain reason is the great difference between English and Chinese relative clauses. Togain a better explanation of this phenomenon, we must turn to the theories oflanguage transfer for help. Otherwise, we can’t get a satisfying answer.The subjects of the present study include sixty students who are all in GradeThree from an ordinary senior high school. Further the instruments consist of threeparts–the Sentence Combination Test, Grammatical Judgment Test and interview. Theformer test is to examine the subjects’ productive ability, while the latter one is toinvestigate their comprehensive ability. The reason why we adopt the interview is tocheck whether our subjects avoid using English RCs. The participants take the sametest at the same time within a time limit. The method of the study is a combination ofquantity and quality ones. In order to make our results valid, we only explore therestrictive relative clauses introduced by relative pronouns such as “who(m)”,“that”,“which” and “whose”. All the data collected will be analyzed by SPSS16.0.In terms of RC types, the accuracy we get from the Sentence Combination Testonly conforms to the hypotheses partially. What we gain from the GrammaticalJudgment Test shows full support to S-O Hierarchy Hypothesis and is consistent with Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy to some degree. While in the light of the matrixposition, both results fully accord with what Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis predictswithout exceptions. In addition, it is a natural part for Chinese learners to make errorsin the learning of English relative clauses. Errors that the participants made in thetests are categorized into six types. According to the analyses of the errors,suggestions aiming at the accuracy of RCs are put forward. Subjects do avoid usingEnglish relative clauses due to the distinction between the relative clauses of Englishand Chinese. Lastly, several approaches and strategies are showed intending toimprove the avoidance to some extent.