语言迁移视角下高中生的英语关系从句习得分析-an analysis of senior high school students acquisition of english relative clauses from the perspective of language transfer.docxVIP

AbstractThe English relative clause has drawn the attention of the linguists and scholars in second language acquisition for a long time due to its importance and complex structure. Since it is complex, it is a headache for L2 learners, especially for our Chinese learners. We either make several mistakes on it or even avoid using it. The main reason is the great difference between English and Chinese relative clauses. To gain a better explanation of this phenomenon, we must turn to the theories of language transfer for help. Otherwise, we can’t get a satisfying answer.The subjects of the present study include sixty students who are all in Grade Three from an ordinary senior high school. Further the instruments consist of three parts –the Sentence Combination Test, Grammatical Judgment Test and interview. The former test is to examine the subjects’ productive ability, while the latter one is to investigate their comprehensive ability. The reason why we adopt the interview is to check whether our subjects avoid using English RCs. The participants take the same test at the same time within a time limit. The method of the study is a combination of quantity and quality ones. In order to make our results valid, we only explore the restrictive relative clauses introduced by relative pronouns such as “who(m)”, “that”, “which” and “whose”. All the data collected will be analyzed by SPSS 16.0.In terms of RC types, the accuracy we get from the Sentence Combination Test only conforms to the hypotheses partially. What we gain from the Grammatical Judgment Test shows full support to S-O Hierarchy Hypothesis and is consistent withNoun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy to some degree. While in the light of the matrix position, both results fully accord with what Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis predicts without exceptions. In addition, it is a natural part for Chinese learners to make errors in the learning of English relative clauses. Errors that the participants made in the tests ar