Research On The Factors Influencing The Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses Among High School Students

Since the 1970 s,relative clauses have drawn extensive attention of scholars at home and abroad due to its special grammatical structures.The present study takes high school students as subjects and carries out from the perspective of syntax and semantics,by controlling clause type,embedding position and antecedent animacy.The study aims to investigate the acquisition of English relative clauses of high school students.In this study,four common types of relative clauses(SS,SO,OO,OS)are combined with the antecedent animacy.A total of 8 types of sentences are as follows: A-SS,A-SO,I-SS,I-SO,A-OS,A-OO,I-OS,I-OO.This study randomly selected 145 students of a key middle school in zhangzhou as experimental subjects.It employs two different elicited tasks,simply,comprehension task(grammatical judgment)and production task(sentence combination)to collect data.The study takes clause type,embeddedness and animacy as independent variables and uses statistics software SPSS21.0 data analysis tool.The experimental data were analyzed by one-way ANOVA and three-way ANOVA,trying to explore: :(1)Under the mutual effects of clause type,embeddedness and animacy,is there a difference of the acquisition of relative clauses in comprehension and production tasks ?Are there significant differences between different types of relative clauses?(2)How do the clause type,embeddedness and animacy have an effect on the acquisition of high school students' English relative clauses?(3)Under the influence of clause type,embeddedness and animacy,what is the acquisition order of four types of English relative clauses(SS,SO,OO,OS)of high school students? Does it conform to the hierarchical order of the NPAH,PDH,PFH and IFH assumptions?The results are as follows:(1)In the production task,the mean of the student's acquisition is A-OS(2.45)>A-OO(2.14)>I-OO(2.11)>I-OS(2.10)>A-SS(2.00)>I-SS(1.96)>I-SO(1.92)>A-SO(1.83).There was a significant difference between the groups(F=6.03 p=0.000).However,in the comprehension task,the mean of the students' acquisition is A-OS(4.20)> I-OO(4.03)>I-OS(4.00)>A-SS(3.85)>A-OO(3.80)>A-SO(3.53)>I-SO(3.23)>I-SS(3.22).There was a significant difference between the groups(F=13.22,p=0.000).Through post hoc,it is found that not all of the clause types have significant differences.In the production task,A-OS is significantly different with A-SS?A-SO?I-SS and I-SO.In the grammatical judgment,the sentence pattern of A-SS,is significantly different with I-SS and I-SO.The sentence pattern between A-SO and A-OS reached a significant level.The sentence pattern of I-SS is significantly different with A-OS,A-OO,I-OS and I-OO.The sentence pattern of I-SO is significantly different with A-OS,I-OS and I-OO.(2)In the production task,both clause type(F(1,1088)=5.71,p=0.017<0.05)and embeddedness(F(1,1088)=25.148,p=0.00 <0.05)produce the main effect,while animacy(F(1,1088)=2.294,p=0.13>0.05)has no main effect.There is a significant interaction effect for embeddedness and animacy(F(1,1088)=3.943,p=0.047<0.05),animacy and clause type(F(1,1088)=4.215,p=0.04 <0.05).There is no interaction between embeddedness and clause type(F(1,1088)=0.327,p=0.567>0.05).There is no three-way interaction between clause type,embeddedness and animacy on students' acquisition of relative clauses.However,in the comprehension task,clause type(F(1,1088)=5.301,p=0.021<0.050),embeddedness(F(1,1088)=59.981,p=0.00<0.05)and animacy(F=8.588,p=0.003<0.05)all have main effects;There is also a significant interaction effect for embeddedness and animacy(F(1,1088)=10.189,p=0.001 <0.05),animacy and clause type(F(1,1088)=8.588,p=0.003<0.05).There is no interaction between embeddedness and clause type(F(1,1088)=0.222,p=0.638>0.05).In addition,there is also no three-way interaction between clause type,embeddedness and animacy on students' acquisition of relative clauses.(3)In the production task,the order from high score to low score of each type of clauses is(OS=4.56)>(OO=4.24)>(SS=3.96)>(SO=3.76),,while in the comprehension task,the order is(OS=8.22)>(OO=7.83)>(SS=7.07)>(SO=6.82)?The results indicate that:(1)In the production and comprehension task,the student's acquisition order is inconsistent.But we can also find that no matter the task is production task or understanding task,the subjects do best in the clause A-OS.There was a significant difference among these types of relative clauses.(2)In the production and comprehension task,clause type and embeddedness affect the subject's acquisition of the relative clauses,while the animacy has a significant influence on the subject's acquisition in the comprehension task,while in the production task the impact is not significant.In both tasks,the interactions of embeddedness and animacy,animacy and clause type have a significant impact on the acquisition.However,the interaction between embeddedness and clause type are not significant.In the two tasks,the interaction of clause type,embeddedness and animacy is not significant.(3)Under the mutual effects of clause type,embeddedness and animacy,in the production and comprehension task,the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis is fully supported in the production task.The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hypothesis and Parallel Fuction Hypothesiss are partially supported,and it doesn't conform to Information Flow Hypothesis.Therefore,teachers should fully consider the influence of various factors on the relative clauses and should teach the relative clauses based on the order of difficulty of the acquisition of relative clauses.They should pay attention to not only the students' comprehension ability,but also their production ability and arrange the teaching of various relative clauses reasonably.