Astudy Of English Relative Clauses For High School Students

The acquisition of English relative clause is considered as one of the most usefuland important points in second language acquisition for Chinese learners. English relativeclause attracts many researchers’ attention due to its complex structures and the greatdifference between Chinese relative clause and English relative clause.Based on these three theories: language transfer, error analysis and Noun PhraseAccessibility Hierarchy, this study aims to find out the common errors high school Englishlearners make in using relative clauses and whether there are some differences of accuracyin using relative clauses between the two different English levels of the learners.90students in grade one of senior high school in Nantong participated in the study,who are divided into three groups: High-score achievers, Intermediate-score achievers andLow-score achievers. Two data elicitation tasks are adopted in this study, includingsentence translation and sentence combination. The first task is designed to find outwhether the students have mastered English relative clause, while the second task is toexamine the students’ accuracy in using English relative clause and the errors they made.The types of English relative clause is based on NPAH(Noun Phrase AccessibilityHierarchy Hypothesis).Besides, two types of English relative clause commonly used in ourdaily communication were added in this study. Two research questions of the study areaddressed below.According to the collection and analysis of data, the study tries to answer these twoquestions:(1) What are the common errors high school English students make in using relativeclauses?(2) Are there any differences of accuracy in using relative clauses between the twogroups of students? If yes, to what extend?Some major findings of the study are summarized in the following after a detaileddiscussion. First, the students make the six main kinds of errors during the process of Englishrelative clauses acquisition, which includes wrong use of the relative pronouns or adverbs,resumptive pronouns, absence of the head noun, omitting of the relative pronouns oradverbs, none-adjacency, omitting the preposition in OPREP and IO relative clauses.Second, there are significant differences between the high-score students andlow-score students when they produce English relative clauses. The number of Englishrelative clauses produced by High-scores students are more than Low-score students. Whatis more, the accuracy of English relatives clauses produced by High-scores students ismuch higher than Low-score students. High-score students didn’t make the two kindserrors, namely resumptive pronouns and omitting of the relative pronouns or adverbs.