The Language Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses By Chinese Junior High School Students

Over the past forty years, studies on the acquisition of English relative clauses have been carried out from various angles by domestic and foreign linguists. Among them, the study of relative clauses from the perspective of language instruction is not only meaningful for linguistic theory but also significant for pedagogy. With regard to the acquisition of English relative clauses, fruitful results have been achieved. For example, Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis is proposed in the theoretical field. A variety of original experimental methods are created in the research of the second language acquisition. Targeting at Krashen "i+1" hypothesis, researchers have put forward novel and practical teaching approaches.However, the research on the acquisition of relative clauses needs to be further improved in some aspects. First of all, the word orders of English relative clauses and Chinese attributive clauses are different, which is one of the reasons why it attracts widespread attention. Few research currently combines the word order issue with the acquisition of relative clauses. Secondly, most previous researchers recruit subjects who are older with higher language proficiency, or at least who have received formal classroom teaching of relative clauses. However, just a few studies touch upon junior high school students whose language proficiency is lower and have not received the formal instructions of English relative clauses. Thirdly, from the view of research methodology, the majority of the previous investigations only employ the language test without adding the element of language instructions, which fails to observe a relatively complete acquisition process; moreover, most research concerned with pedagogy adopts one teaching method while there are only a few studies involve several teaching techniques and discover the different effects of different teaching approaches. Therefore, more detailed research and discussion should be conducted with regard to the acquisition of relative clauses.On the basis of previous studies, the present research overcomes the deficiencies in the previous studies and explore the acquisition of English relative clauses by junior high school students. The subjects in the present study firstly participated in a pre-test and then they received the implicit instruction and the explicit instruction before completing the post-test which aims to observe the differences between the two instructing methods. The thesis is an empirical study which adopts language comprehension test and output test. The24subjects in this study who were in Grade7came from a tutoring agency and were randomly divided into the experimental group which received explicit instruction of English relative clauses and the control group with implicit input. In addition, the experimental group was further divided into two groups. One group received only grammar teaching while the other one received not only grammar teaching but also knowledge related with word order issues. Language materials and data in the research were analyzed from various perspectives by means of PASW18.0.Through data analyses and discussions, it is discovered that the learners in the experimental group comprehend better than the control group in terms of the knowledge of relative clauses. In particular, the group with the additional word order teaching behaves much better than the one with only grammar teaching. However, the control group outperforms the experimental group concerning the sentence structures of relative clauses. Meanwhile, the present study also presents the difficulty order of different sentence types in relative clauses.The thesis integrates the acquisition of relative clauses with the issues of word order and pedagogy so that we can get a better understanding of the acquisition of English relative clauses by Chinese junior high school students. In order to achieve different teaching objectives in respect of English relative clauses, different instructing approaches can be employed. In addition, the compositions completed by the control group are new language materials with nearly seven thousand words, which makes a contribution for future related studies.