| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 92 === Abstract
The main goal of this study is to analyze the errors in English relative clauses made by senior high school students in Taiwan. Its purpose is to find the students’ difficulties with this area of grammar learning and to identify the possible reasons for committing such errors. At the end, some pedagogical implications are offered to teach English relative clauses to senior high school students more effectively to reduce learners’ errors in this field.
The subjects of the study include 168 third-year senior high school students in the Kaohsiung area. For data analysis, only 90 of them are chosen as sampled subjects and are divided into two groups according to their scores from the multiple- choice test in English relative clauses. All the errors found in the corpus, including sentence-combining and Chinese-English translation, are classified into seven main categories.
The analytic results indicate that the hierarchy of difficulty of error types, in descending order, is listed as follows: (1) wrong choice of relative pronouns, (2) confusion of non-restrictive RCs with restrictive RCs and vice versa, (3) misusing expressions of quantity in relative clauses,(4) wrong omission of the preposition after or before a relative clause (5) redundant use of pronouns, (6) lack of agreement in number between the relative pronoun and the following verb, and (7) wrong omission of relative pronouns.
The finding of the study shows that wrong choice of relative pronouns is the most frequent errors found with all categories of relative clauses. In order to reduce such kind of errors, the usage and function of relative clauses should be explained and clarified for the learners. Moreover, the result of the acquisition order of English relative clauses in the present study supports Kuno (1974)’s hypothesis claiming the difficulty of center embedding process: OS＞OO＞SS＞SO (hardest to easiest). In other words, center embedding and relative pronoun fronting are the major obstacles to Chinese learners of English. In this way, the teacher can help students acquire relative clauses effectively by means of the order of difficulty.
In the process of learning English relative clauses, there are six major causes of errors made by students as follows: (1) overgeneralization (2) simplification (3) L1 transfer (4) ignorance of rule restrictions (5) incomplete application of rules (6) carelessness. The author has found that interference from Chinese turns out to be one of the major causes for making errors in relative clauses. As a result, the study suggests that through a contrastive analysis of relative clauses in English and Chinese, we are able to help the students reduce errors in learning relative clauses.
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