The Impact Of Negative Transfer Of Native Language On Chinese College Students' Acquisition Of English Relative Clause

English relative clause,as an important syntax,has been paid considerable attention to by many linguists and scholars in Second Language Acquisition because of its unique syntactic properties,its frequency and usefulness in our everyday use of language,and its universality in languages of the world.Meanwhile,since it is complex in structure,relative clause is also one of the most difficult structures for second language learners.Based on the relevant theory of language transfer,this research is conducted with 43 native speakers whose writings have been included in the LOCNESS corpus,43 English majors from Ningxia University and 43 non-English majors from North Minzu University.Both quantitative and qualitative method,including composition,interview,and the Grammaticality Judgement Test are used in this research.In order to verify the impact of negative transfer of native language on Chinese students' acquisition of English relative clause,this research tries to answer the following three questions.?Compared with native English speakers,do Chinese college students underproduce English relative clause in English writing??What types of errors often occur in Chinese college students' production of English relative clause?What kinds of negative transfer result in these errors??In terms of English relative clause acquisition,what kind of correlation can be found between negative transfer of Chinese and Chinese college students'English proficiency?Through a thorough analysis of the data elicited,the research indicates that negative transfer of native language does have an influence on Chinese college students' acquisition of English relative clause.Firstly,Chinese college students produce fewer relative clauses than native speakers,which can be reflected in both the quantity and the variety.Secondly,some major errors that students produce are relative pronoun selection,distinction of restrictive and non-restrictive relative clause,relative pronoun preposing,resumptive pronoun,relative pronoun absence,missing of antecedents,and these errors are influenced by Chinese language transfer.Thirdly,there is a negative correlation between negative transfer of Chinese and Chinese college students' English proficiency.Students with higher English proficiency are less influenced by the negative trans.fer of Chinese,while students with lower English proficiency are more influenced by the negative transfer of Chinese.The present study provides further evidence in research on language transfer and the acquisition of English relative clause.It is hoped that it can contribute to the future research in these aspects.In the meantime,the research also provides some pedagogical significance to English teachers that they are supposed to treat the influence of Chinese on English learning appropriately and analyze positively the reasons of errors so as to facilitate second language teaching and learning.