A Comparative Study Of Use Of Relative Clauses By The English Majors In Their Spoken And Written Narratives From The Same Topic Trigger

This study seeks to investigate Chinese EFL learners’ use of relative clauses (RCs) in their oral and written narrative production, with the primary focus on the differences in the use of RCs between learners’ oral and written narrative compositions and the differences in the use of RCs across the learners of different proficiency levels, and with the secondary focus on the correlation between the learners’ use of RCs and their narrative performances.The spoken data submitted for this analysis were taken from SWECCL, a Chinese learner corpus, in which60cases were selected and divided into two groups:30higher-level cases and30lower-level cases on the basis of the test-takers’ oral performances. The written data were60pieces of writing collected from the sophomores of English majors. The written compositions were divided into higher-and lower-groups on the basis of their writing performances. The analytical framework followed in this study was based on Keenan and Comrie (1977), according to whom, there are six types of RCs in terms of grammatical roles that the head noun (i.e., antecedent) plays in a RC, namely Subject (SU), Direct Object (DO), Indirect Object (10), Object of Preposition (OPREP), Genitive (GEN) and Object of Comparative (OCOMP). The data analysis generated the following findings:First, in all the sampled cases analyzed, five types of RCs were identified:SU, DO, GEN, OPREP and OCOMP, but no instances of IO type were found. The Chinse learners’ scant use of such a type is inconsistent with Keenan and Comrie’s Noun Phrase Accessibility Hypothesis (NPAH), according to which IO type is relatively more capable being acquired. In addition, the overall frequency of use of RCs in either oral or writing production constitutes no more than10%of the sampled data, a lower frequency of use in comparison with European EFL learners. Such a tendency is probably related to the inherent differences between Chinese and English languages. The result also confirms Schachter’s hypothesis (1974):The learners whose L1does not have RCs would make scant use of RCs, and by contrast, the learners whose L1has RCs would naturally make more use of RCs.Second, the results of the independent-samples t-test indicates that there is significant difference between oral and written narrative compositions in the total frequency of the use of RCs, and more significant difference in the use of SU, DO and OPREP types in the written compositions. Such a tendency is quite natural since the learners may have much more time and attentional resources at their disposal in the process of writing. However, no significant differences were found in the use of GEN and OCOMP, confirming Keenan and Comrie’s NPAH, according to which GEN and OCOMP are most difficult to be acquired.In addition, no significant difference was found in RCs’proportion between the spoken and written samples, suggesting that the use of RCs can not be employed as an indicator to register differences in learners’production, both written and oral.Third, as indicated in the cross-level comparisons of the use of RCs, the higher-level learners used significantly more SU and DO types than the lower levels in their spoken and written narrative productions, and the exception is the significant difference found only in the use of OPREP in their oral narratives. Such differences may partially confirm VanPatten’s research (1990) that L2learners tend to prioritize their concern for content over for form, particularly when they are not linguistically capable of allocating their attentional resources.Finally, correlation and multiple regression analyses indicate that the use of RCs is positively correlated with the learners’performances. Specifically, SU, DO and OPREP types enjoy predicting power to the learners’oral performances while in the case of writing, SU and DO types enjoy a strong predicting power. Especially, DO type in oral and SU type in writing can be used as effective indicators to learners’performances.The findings generated from the current research may have some implications, both theoretical and practical:From the theoretical perspective, the findings yielded from this study have partially confirmed and extended Keenan and Comrie’s NAPH. And what is more, the study offers some insights in to the use of RCs in learners’utterances. From the pedagogical perspective, the use of RCs can be considered as one of the indicators to learners’performances on both speaking and writing tasks, and the tasks of producing narratives in particular. In addition, it should be noted that L1transfer may affect L2learners’acquisition of different types of RCs, and thereby, teachers are expected to help students to focus their attention on the linguistic differences between Chinese and English while elaborating on the grammatical knowledge of RCs or assessing L2learners’use of RCs.