The Study Of Acquisition Of Relative Clauses In English By Chinese Senior High School Students

At present, theories in second language acquisition have kept emerging in an endless stream, such as Chomsky's UG grammar, Krashen's Monitor Theory, Schumann's Pidginization Hypothesis and Acculturation Model, Multidimensional Model, Accessibility Hierarchy and etc. which are of methodological and epistemological significance to our English language teaching in china. But the question is how we shall apply them to our classroom teaching to facilitate efficiency of language learning.This paper firstly introduces some fundamental concepts related to second langue acquisition, such as SLA, language teaching, language learning and etc. so as to have a better understanding of corresponding theories and researches. Secondly, it has a brief overview of three hypotheses related to acquisition of relative clauses in English. namely, Slobin's Interruption Hypothesis, Sheldon's Parallel-Function Hypothesis and Keenan and Comrie's Accessibility Hierarchy, holding the view that they all have methodological and empirical implications for language acquisition. Thirdly, it explores acquisition of relative clauses in English by Chinese high school students, with the conclusion that there existed an order of difficulty for Chinese students acquiring relative clauses in English, and this order of difficulty conformed to the Accessibility Hierarchy. And then it analyzes in detail the process in which students dealt with the identification task and sentence-joining task, trying to explain why there exists the order of difficulty to Chinese students. Lastly, it discusses relationship of the outcome of research to language teaching and language learning.In this paper, this author tries to find a way to relate Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis to acquisition of relative clauses in English by Chinese students, for the purpose of which, a research was conducted to test to what extent students had grasped the four types of relative clauses, namely, subject, object, object of preposition and genitive and to see whether there also existed a corresponding order...