ABSTRACT

The present study is designed to investigate the difficulties of Chinese students in acquiring English attributive clauses and verify the effectiveness of meta-linguistic explanation by adopting a “pretest-treatment-posttest” design and analyzing the errors students committed in two tests. The results show that: (1) meta-linguistic explanation can do great help to Chinese students in acquiring English attributive clauses; (2) a few students have difficulties in using relative pronouns or adverbs because of their limited knowledge of English attributive clauses; (3) a large number of Chinese students choose to avoid using English attributive clauses, which is caused by the great differences in syntactic structure between Chinese and English and also some students do not master the various functions of English attributive clauses; (4) although some students are conscious of using English attributive clauses, they choose to use non-restrictive attributive clauses rather than restrictive attributive clauses due to their unawareness of the differences between English non-restricted and restricted attributive clauses and lack of tacit knowledge of English relative clauses.

Key words: acquisition of the attributive clause; meta-linguistic explanation; English learning

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABSTRACT

摘要

Chapter One  INTRODUCTION-1

Chapter Two  LITERATURE REVIEW-2

Chapter Three  RESEARCH DESIGN-5

3.1 Research Questions-5

3.2 Participants-5

3.3 Instrument-5

3.4 Procedure-6

3.5 Scoring-6

Chapter Four  RESULTS AND DISCUSSION-8

4.1 Errors Chinese Students often Commit in Learning English Attributive Clauses-8

4.2 The Effectiveness of Meta-linguistic Explanation in Acquiring English Attributive Clauses-10

4.2.1 The effectiveness of meta-linguistic explanation-10

4.2.2 The causes of the difficulties of Chinese students in learning English attributive clauses-11

4.3 Summary-16

Chapter Five  CONCLUSION-17

5.1 Major Findings-17

5.2 Suggestions-17

5.3 Limitations of This Paper and Further directions-18

REFRENCES-19

APPENDIX 1-20

APPENDIX 2-21

APPENDIX 3-22