A Study On Avoidance Phenomenon Of Relative Clause In College English Writing

As a common psychological phenomenon in second language acquisition,avoidance phenomenon has received linguists' attention which means that foreign language learners always replace complex and unfamiliar language forms by using familiar ones or use simple vocabularies and structures instead of difficult and obscure ones.To a certain degree,if learners use avoidance as communication strategies appropriately,all or part of the communicative purposes can be achieved.However,if they overuse it,their language ability is hard to be improved.Since avoidance is objective,it is very important to correctly understand and treat this phenomenon in foreign language teaching and research.As a very important grammatical structure,relative clauses(RCs)have been favored by many linguistic researchers.One of the most widely known theories is Keenan & Comrie's Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy(NPAH).Due to the large differences between English and Chinese RCs,Chinese students have many difficulties in acquiring English RCs,especially in writings.Students prefer to use simple sentences to avoid complicated clauses.Based on the above two points,this study will use the relevant theory of avoidance and RCs to analyze avoidance phenomenon of RCs in college students' writings in order to find out what types of RCs they avoid and the subjective and objective factors that cause this phenomenon.Finally,there is a great expectation which enlightens and helps college English teaching will be proposed.According to the analysis of previous studies,88 undergraduates from two universities in northeast are selected to study the avoidance phenomenon of RCs in their English compositions.At the same time,sentence combining tests and questionnaires are carried out too.With the quantitative and qualitative methods,this study focuses on answering the following three research questions: 1)What kind of RCs students avoid more frequently in their writings? 2)What are the objective factors of this phenomenon? 3)What are the subjective factors of this phenomenon?The results will show that: firstly,in their writings,students prefer to avoid IO,OPREP and OCOMP RCs,which is in accordance with the result of NPAH.Secondly,the objective factors include mainly four aspects: the memory capacity,the negative transfer of mother tongue,the inevitable phenomenon of interlanguage development and the differences between English and Chinese.Thirdly,as far as students' psychological factors are concerned,avoidance is mainly caused by over-anxiety and lack of self-efficiency as well as the extrinsic motivation and students' neural attitudes towards RCs.In line with the above research results,this study puts forward some suggestions for college English teaching from the perspectives of teachers and students respectively.In terms of teachers,first of all,they should increase the input and output of IO,OPREP and OCOMP RCs in the classroom as much as possible,in the meantime pay attention to differences between English and Chinese RCs to help students master these three types of RCs that are difficult to acquire.Second,teachers should encourage students to establish a good sense of self-efficiency and confidence in order to overcome the anxiety when facing complex grammatical structures.For students,firstly,students should develop a correct attitude towards avoidance phenomenon and use avoidance strategy appropriately.Second,students must overcome their anxiety and fear and also try to increase the input and output of complex RCs.Due to the limitations of objective conditions and my own lack of experience,there are still some limitations in this research,which is hoped to make some progress in future research.