A Study Of Uyghur University Students' Acquisition Of The English Relative-Clauses In Xinjiang

Uygurs are one of the distinct ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.They are in a unique language environment and a special cultural atmosphere,which create their unique language learning characteristics.The relative clause has attracted the attention of linguists because of the uniqueness of its syntactic structure,the universality of existence and the high frequency of use.Researchers from home and abroad have explored the issue from more aspects and put forward a variety of possible assumptions,but for Uygur students,English is their third language,how have they acquired English relative clauses? Through the search,rare investigations have been found.Therefore,in this study,a sample of 50 sophomores of non-English major students is selected from a college in Xinjiang as the research object.The study employs Chinese-English translation,Sentence Combination Test,English-Chinese translation,Grammatical Judgment Test,and assists in the interview method to explore Uygur college students the acquisition situation of English relative clauses.Three questions are set in this paper:1.What is the difficulty level of understanding and producing relative clauses of Uygur college students in Xinjiang? Whether the difficulty order shown by the students is consistent with the hypothesis of the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy and the perceptual difficulty hypothesis? 2.Analyze the errors made by Uygur students in the understanding and producing testing,and explore the main reasons why they make errors?3.How to improve the accuracy of the acquisition of English relative clauses of Uygur students in Xinjiang?It has been found: 1.The difficulty level of the Uyghur college students in understanding and producing English relative clauses is not consistent with the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy hypothesis.However,it is completely consistent with the perceptual difficulty hypothesis.Students show different levels of difficulty in the acquisition of all types of relative clauses.2.There are six types of errors for Uyghur Students whose English is their third language when they acquire the relative clauses,the errors are pronouns retention,non-adjacency,incorrect relative pronoun,inappropriate omission of relative-clause marker,absence of antecedents and the confusion of relative-clause in this study.According to the analysis of the causes of errors,it is found that,due to the differences in the syntactic structure of the three languages of English,Chinese and English,the subjects are influenced by their mother tongue and their second language when they learn the relative clauses.The subjects avoid the use of English relative clauses because of psychological distance of three languages' relative clauses.This study has the following suggestions and countermeasures for the teaching and acquisition of English relative clauses for Uygur students: Teachers should focus on the system teaching of English relative clause in the teaching practice;Focus on the comparativedifferences in the syntactic structure of the three languages;In the teaching process teachers should increase the comprehensible input and output;In view of student differences and needs,the classification and evaluation system of teaching should be used;Improve the teaching method of the clauses;Focus on learner differences and improve learners' learning strategies and interests;Continuously improve the level of Chinese,it is necessary to improve the level of awareness of Chinese.