An Analysis of Relative Clause Acquisition in the Spoken Corpus of Chinese EFL Learners

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of the present study was to examine the nature of relative clause (hereafter, RC) acquisition of Chinese EFL learners with two distinctive levels of oral English proficiency based on the Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (Wen, Wang, & Liang, 2009). 207 English-majored sophomore students’ oral narratives in a given topic were analyzed in term of overall oral proficiency, frequency distribution of RC, type of RC, and type of RC error. The results indicate that students with high oral proficiency were likely to be more productive and more accurate on RCs than those with low one. In addition, the six types of RCs they produced in the spoken context provided support for the RC accessibility hierarchies. Moreover, there were a close relationship of RC production to oral proficiency; more specifically, OS and OOGen RC structures were significant predictors of oral proficiency. Further the possible causes for RC errors were cross-linguistically explored. In alignment with that, pedagogical implications for English-L2 RC acquisition were discussed.

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