A Study On The. High School Students' Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses

English relative clause (RC) is a significant part of English grammar,as well as an important grammar structure in second language learning. On the topic of relative clauses,both researchers at home and abroad have arranged a series of studies from different perspectives in the fields of linguistics and SLA. In the studies concerning Chinese learners' acquisition of English relative clauses, a large proportion of the subjects are college students with higher English proficiencies, while the studies on elementary and medium level students are relatively few. On this account, this thesis takes the students in a high school in China as the participants for investigation, aiming to investigate the status quo of how they have acquired English relative clauses so that the research findings can bring some implications for English complex constructions' teaching and learning in future.The participants of this study were high school students of a senior high school in Wuhan. They came from two classes, which included 120 students, 65 boys and 55 girls.Their ages ranged from 15 to 17 years old.. They were divided into high, intermediate,and low proficiency groups respectively according to their English grades before. The research instruments cover a grammar test on English relative clauses and an interview.This research is arranged to investigate to what extent the students in senior high school have grasped English relative clauses. The research questions of this study are listed below:1) Is there any difference among students with different English proficiencies (eg.high proficiency students, intermediate proficiency students, and low proficiency students) in their acquisition of English RCs?2) Do different types of relative clauses vary in the students' acquisition?3) Does the students' acquisition of RCs show consistency in different application(e.g. true or false questions, sentences combination, English-Chinese translation,Chinese-English translation)?To answer those research questions, this study attempts to examine the participants,knowledge of English RCs by a grammar test and an interview afterward. The relative clauses are classified according to Keenan & Comrie (1967), supplemented by the three types of relative clauses led by relative adverbs. And thus there are altogether nine types of RCs in the investigation, and they are respectively SU, DO, 10, OPREP, GEN,OCOMP,and those introduced by relative adverbs when, where,and why. The 110 students are divided into the high proficiency group, the intermediate proficiency group,and the low proficiency group. After grading all the items in test papers, I analyzed the collected data with the help of software SPSS 21.0. In addition, I made a supplementary face to face interview to the students with the topics on their knowledge about relative pronouns, relative adverbs and the difficulties they have met during the process of learning English RCs.From the study, conclusions can be drawn as follows. First of all, senior high school students have a relatively pleasant grasp of this grammar item. Secondly, a quite high standard deviation value indicates that there is a big gap among different students'performances. Students with higher English proficiency level tend to get higher marks at all kinds of grammar test tasks, testing learners' comprehensive and productive ability.The reason for such phenomenon could be attributed to the high and intermediate level students' good command of this structure and low level students' fear and lacking of confident in grasping the RC structure. Of the nine English RC types, the OPREP type seems to be the most difficult one for those participants at all English levels. Last but not least, the students do better in comprehensive tasks than productive tasks and 20% of them would avoid the use of RCs in the productions. Nearly half of them would also be puzzled about which relative word to choose in real situations. Those investigations and analyses, put together, could help us draw implications' for teachers' teaching in the classroom: Teachers should provide proper guidance and practice to consolidate students,acquisition effects; different instruction methods should be discovered to help students at different English levels; teachers can encourage students to use this structure in productive practices such as daily speaking practices and writings; and weight should be paid to the students' weak performance in the OPREP type of RCs. For the learners themselves,they need to realize that the command of a complex grammar structure needs time and what they should do is to be confident in themselves. Some difficult types of RCs like the OPREP type could be gradually grasped when they follow the acquisition rules.The constricted subjects and RC classification make this study limited, and thus for latter studies, the amount of samples, as well as more subjects should be included, which can help to reflect on the real situation more correctly. Besides, more types of RCs and test forms such as composition task could be introduced.