The Study Of The Acquisition Of The English Attributive Clause By High School Students

The restrictive attributive clauses have been the study empasis of language experts because of their unique syntactic structures, universal existence and the high frequency used in. daily communication. The study of the restrictive attributive clauses are from three aspects: the study of their structure; the psycho-linguistic study of their cognitive processing ang the acquiring study of Language1 and Language2. The acquiring study of the restrictive attributive clauses is focusing on pure linguistics and language teaching. The researchers have researched into the feature of the clauses which can be learned and the difficulty hierarchy the Language1 and Language2 learners show. They also put forward lots of hypotheses. And the Accessibility Hierarchy of Keenan and Comrie is the best-known. At present, there are still some weaknesses of the study. Firstly, although there are over forty types of restrictive attributive clauses, only part of them have been studied. Secondly, the research methods are not enough. Last but not least, there are not many researches studying Chinese, even less studying Chinese high school students.Therefore, in order to improve the acquiring study of this field, in this essay, I studied how Chinese comprehensive high school students acquired them. The prediction of the Accessibility Hierarchy was tested first .I would find out whether the difficulty hierarchy shown by the students was in line with the hypothesis according to the right percentages of different kinds of clauses they got. Then a teaching experiment based on the hypothesis was carried out to test whether the students would high study efficiency. As a result, the teaching effect may be better with this method.The processing sentence combination test and the understanding grammatically judgement test were employed in the two experiments. As to the teaching experiment based on the Accessibility Hierarchy, there was a pre-test, a post-test and a following test .The pre-test was used to know the students' master degree of the restrictive attributive clauses. There was an exrerimental class and a compared class. During the experimenting period , the compared class was taught as usual, while the experimental class was taught the hypothesis, did related exercises and had stage tests. At last, the two classes had the post -test and the following test. The data were analyzed in terms of the mean score and the standard deviation. I found the order of the right percentages of different kinds of clauses the students got in the testing test was almost in line with the hypothesis. But the tendency of their right percentages in sentence combination decreased much faster than that of the grammaticality judgement. There was a similarity and diffrences between the two classes in the experiment based on the hypothesis. The similarity was that they all got higher marks after the experiments. The diffrences were that the scores of the experimental class in the post-test and following test were obviously higher than those of the compared class. Besides, the score of the following test of the experimental class did not obviously decrease, while that of the compared class decreased.Therefore, the conclusion that the acquisition of the Chinese students, especially low level comprehensive high school students was in line with the prediction of the hypothesis and the teaching based on the hypothesis was effective could be drawn. We could also learn that learners should be ready when studying target structures. While teaching, English teachers should clearly teach the IO, Gen, Oprep and OComp that students always avoid using and compare English and Chinese. Meanwhile, how to save time and labor to get high efficiency in teaching grammar is still a problem to study. The limitations of present study were as follows. Although the two teaching methods in the experiment based on the hypothesis could be compared because they had the same input materials and time, it may be too early to judge one was bad and the other was good. The effect of the teaching based on the hypothesis could last four and a half weeks, but it didn't show it could last half a year or even longer time, nor could we draw a conclusion that the twelve types of restrictive attributive clauses studied had been acquired. Moreover, limited samples, not long enough experimental time, the teachers emphasizing the importance of the clauses and watching the whole studying process may influence the result. So, I expect further researches into the hypothesis will be carried out.