A Study Of College Students’ Acquisition Of English Clauses

English clauses play an important part in English learning. Chinese students who learn English find it difficult not only in input (such as discourse analysis, reading comprehension, etc.) but also in output (such as spoken English and English writing, etc.) This is true to college students whose acquisition of English clauses is not optimistic. Problems can be reflected in both their written and spoken English. Therefore, it is of great significance to study college students’acquisition of English clauses, analyze the problems in teaching English clauses and propose the corresponding strategies.This research is based on both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The data was collected from3essays of40freshmen from one class of non-English majors in Yangtze University, College of Arts and Sciences. English clauses (including finite English clauses, non-finite English clauses and verbless clauses) have been marked, input into the computer, classified, and statistically analyzed. The analyses include college students’acquisition of different types of English clauses (including using frequency and acquisition order) and the errors they make when using them. Based on the analyses, some problems in teaching English clauses and the corresponding solutions have been proposed.Research shows that students use the finite clauses most frequently, and non-finite clauses and verbless clauses follow it. Among the finite clauses, the adverbial clauses are the ones students use most frequently, and the nominal clauses and relative clauses follow it. Among the adverbial clauses, the rank of using frequency is:adverbial clause of condition, adverbial clause of time, adverbial clause of cause, adverbial clause of result, adverbial clause of concession, adverbial clause of comparison and adverbial clause of manner. Adverbial clause of place and adverbial clause of purpose are not shown in the data due to the limitation of the data. Among the nominal clauses, the rank of using frequency is:nominal clause of object, nominal clause of opposition, nominal clause of predicative and nominal clause of subject. Among the relative clauses, finite relative clauses are used more frequently than non-finite relative clauses. Among the non-finite clauses, infinitive clauses are used the most frequently. Among the infinitive clauses, those with subjects are more frequently used than those without subjects or interrogatives. Among the non-finite clauses, the using frequency of-ing participle clauses ranks the second. Among them, those without subjects or connectives are most frequently used. Those with connectives or subjects follow it. Among the non-finite clauses,-ed participle clause is used the least frequently. There is just one-ed participle clause with subject in students’writing, so the research is limited. As to verbless clause, there is also just one example. The acquisition order is mainly analyzed from difficulty hierarchy. They are as follows:Finite Subordinate Clause>Non-finite Clause>Verbless Clause. Among the Finite Subordinate Clause, the difficulty hierarchy is Relative Clause>Adverbial Clause>Nominal Clause. As to the Relative Clause, the difficulty hierarchy is Finite Relative Clause>Non-finite Relative Clause. As to the Adverbial Clause, the difficulty hierarchy is Adverbial Clause of Result> Adverbial Clause of Cause> Adverbial Clause of Concession> Adverbial Clause of Time> Adverbial Clause of Condition. As to the Nominal Clause, the difficulty hierarchy is Nominal Clause of Subject> Nominal Clause of Object> Nominal Clause of Opposition> Nominal Clause of Predicative. Among the Non-finite Clause, it’s-ing Participle Clause>Infinitive Clause>-ed Participle Clause. As to the-ing Participle Clause, the difficulty hierarchy is those with subjects>those without subjects or connectives>those with connectives. Due to the limited data, the research on some types of English clauses can’t be conducted as is expected. Errors in the finite clauses mainly include errors of introductory connectives and errors in the clausal structure. Errors of introductory connectives include misuse, omission, overuse and incorrect place. Errors in the clausal structure include misordering, component absence (which includes subject absence, predicate absence, absence of subject and predicate, and object absence) and component redundancy. Due to the limited data, errors of the non-finite clauses and verbless clauses are less. Errors in the relationship between the main and subordinate clause include presence of subordinate clause and absence of main clause and the reverse of the two. College students’acquisition of English clauses reflects some problems in teaching English clauses at college, such as the lack of systematic teaching of English clauses, the lack of comparison between different types of English clauses as well as the Chinese and English clauses, and the lack of practice of using English clauses. In response to these problems, some strategies have been proposed, such as a systematic teaching of English clauses, more comparison of different types of English clauses as well as the Chinese and English clauses, more output practice and new teaching methods of English clauses.Finally, based on the results, limitations are analyzed and suggestions are proposed. Because of the limited English proficiency of students, the research has some limitations. For example, due to the English proficiency of students, some types of English clauses haven’t been used in the writing. Students have avoided them. What is more, some types of English clauses are not used frequently, which added difficulty to the analyses of acquisition order of English clauses. As to the acquisition order, analyses are mainly made from a broad sense, that is the acquisition order of different types of English clauses. There is not enough research on the syntactic acquisition order of a certain type of English clause. Besides, the research didn’t last long. Therefore, further research can be conducted by collecting data from students of different English proficiency. And various forms of data can be designed, such as translation, multiple choices, correcting mistakes other than writing to analyze the acquisition order of different types of English clauses.