An Empirical Study On The Acquisition Order Of English Relative Clauses For Chinese EFL Learners In Senior High School

As a common syntactic structure, relative clause has interested many scholars and got studied in the first and second language acquisition due to its unique structural complexity and its frequency in everyday use of language. Since the 1970s, many studies abroad have been carried out from the aspects including the comprehension and production of relative clauses to probe their acquisition order. Although several hypotheses were put forward, a consensus about the acquisition order of relative clauses has not been reached up to now. And in comparison with the booming of studies abroad, the domestic ones were limited in numbers. Apart from these limitations, most of previous researches just put much emphasis on certain types of relative clauses at the cost of ignoring others.Therefore, the present study, from the perspective of production, aimed to make a complete exploration into the acquisition order of twelve kinds of English relative clauses for Chinese EFL students in senior high school and to compare it with the predicated order by the three hypotheses including Keenan & Comrie’s Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy(NPAH), Kuno’s Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis(PDH), and Hamilton’s Subject-Object Hierarchy Hypothesis(SOHH). Meanwhile, this study also intended to investigate the influence of two different elicitations and English proficiency on the production of English relative clauses for senior high school students.The present study adopted the sentence combination task under two different explicit and implicit elicitations to investigate the acquisition of English relative clauses for 106 senior high school students of grade two with different English proficiency. The major findings were as follows:(1) There did exist an acquisition order of English relative clauses for Chinese senior high school students:English relative clauses embedded in matrix object position were produced more than those embedded in matrix subject position, which provided full support for the prediction of PDH but only partial support for the predictions of NPAH and SOHH. (2) Different elicitations did affect the production of English relative clauses and subjects with explicit elicitations had a better performance in producing English relative clauses than those with implicit elicitations. (3) The English proficiency impacted significantly the production of English relative clauses for subjects with implicit elicitations but have no, if any, little influence for those with explicit elicitations.Relative clauses are indeed one of important and difficult English grammatical structures for Chinese EFL students in senior high school. The major findings related to the acquisition order of English relative clauses can serve as an important reference to the teaching and learning of English relative clauses in classroom setting and the compiling of the textbooks related to the English relative clauses.