An Empirical Study Of Comprehension And Production In English Relative Clause Learning By A High School Learners

Research on relative clause acquisition has drawn great attention in secondlanguage acquisition. Research on its acquisition difficulty mainly focuses on twoaspects: the functions the head noun serves in the sub-clause reflected by different RCtypes and the embeddedness of a relative clause manifested by two positions, i.e. thematrix subject position and the matrix object position. A number of investigationshave been done from various angles by researchers at home and abroad. Most tendedto investigate the difficulty order of English relative clause by comprehension orproduction measure rather than by comprehension and production task together. Andmost previous explanations are based only on one single rationale irrespective of anyothers. Therefore, no satisfactory explanation is obtained so far. Finally, the learners’proficiency levels are seldom considered in this field.The present research, based on the previous findings, aims to make a deepinvestigation into the acquisition of relative clauses by Chinese senior high schoollearners of English as a foreign language at two language proficiency levels. In thisstudy,100subjects are from two classes: key-class and no-key class, which separatelystand for high level and low level. A combination test for production and agrammaticality test for comprehension are used to collect data. The data are thensubmitted to statistical analysis: a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) using twowithin-participants factors, RC types. Meanwhile, Independent Samples Test of scoresin the two tests between high and low level group is conducted to find the acquisitionorders are similar or different.The main findings are:First, despite the comparative syntactic complexity of GEN over SU, DO andOPREP, GEN is shown to be easier to process than the following three respectively inboth tests. This may indicate that the syntactic complexity is not the only factor toconstrain the acquisition difficulties of different RC types. Second, the processingdifficulties of relative sentence are determined by the matrix position, RC types andthe interaction of matrix position*RC types in both the two tests. Third, theacquisition orders presented by Chinese learners under condition of results on EFLdifferent proficiency levels in high school in the two tests are different. Independent samples T-test between high level group and low level group indicates the two group’sscore of the sentence combination test except OPREP and GEN are significantlydifferent. However, Independent Samples Test of scores in the grammaticality testexcept SU and DO gets an opposite result.Throughout the comparison and discussions, the present study finds that Chinesesenior high school learners’ difficulty orders in comprehension and production ofrelative clause are determined by various factors hierarchically and simultaneously.The syntactic complexity and the matrix position are mainly to affect the difficultyorder of English relative clause. Meanwhile, the language proficiency level, to someextent, is attributed to the difficulty order of English relative clause.