Interlingual Factors in Chinese College Students' Acquisition of English Relative Clauses

The acquisition of English relative clauses has been studied from different angles by researchers. It is now generally acknowledged that the acquisition of relative clauses is determined by three factors: interlingual, intralingual and universal factors. This study aims to explore one of these factors—interlingual factors. On the basis of contrastive analysis of English and Chinese relative clause formation strategies, this study put forward three research questions and three corresponding hypotheses. With 112 Chinese college students as the subjects and three tasks (a composition task, a multiple choice test and a grammaticality judgment test) as the elicitation measures, this paper made a tentative study of English relative clause acquisition by Chinese college students from the aspect of interlingual factors. Careful analyses by means of the SPSS were made on the results of the study, and it was found that the Chinese college students underproduced English relative clauses and committed some errors related to interlingual factors in the use of relative clauses. In view of these findings, implications for teaching and further research were put forward.

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