Underproduction and Overproduction: Comparison of the Use of English Relative Clauses in Chinese EFL Learners’ and Native Speakers’ Academic Writing

This study investigates Chinese ESL learners’ production of English relative clauses in academic writing with corpus-based methodologies. With the help of a series of retrieval codes for Antconc software designed for the investigation, different types of relative clauses in both L1-Chinese students’ and L1-English students’ essays are identified for statistical analysis and textual analysis. The results validate a phenomenon reported in previous studies that Chinese ESL learners generally underproduce relative clauses. Meanwhile, it is found that they especially underproduce finite restrictive relative clauses and non-finite present participial relative clauses. On the other hand, we unexpectedly find they overproduce non-restrictive relative clauses compared with native speakers. The analysis of some representative examples reveals that their behaviours could be attributed to the following factors: 1) the insufficient mastery of the grammatical structure of relative clauses; 2) the way they organize information; 3）the transfer from Chinese “run-on sentences. These findings could provide insights for ESL teachers to understand L1-English students’ problems with producing relative clauses and better teach them how and when to use certain types of relative clauses.