The Analysis of Chinese Intermediate Students’ Error in Using Relative Clauses

Abstract

This research is designed to figure out the error of Chinese intermediate students’ in using relative clauses and its reason. The relative pronouns are limited to which, who, whom and whose and the relative adverbs are limited to when, where and why. The theory of analysing the data is error analysis and the research used qualitative method to describe the data. The ways to collect the data are observation and interview. The former one is designed to give a report of students’ choice of relative pronouns and relative adverbs. The latter one aims at gathering the reasons for the students’ error in using relative pronouns and relative adverbs. There are 10 participants from Grade XI, Class 1 and 10 participants from Grade XI, Class 2 in a public high school in Changji, the Xinjing Uygur Autonomous Region. The participants have been introduced the relative clause and the relative pronouns and relative adverbs. The result shows that the students made 12, 13, 13, 14 errors in relative pronoun “which, who, whom and whose” and made 8, 10, 11 errors in relative adverbs “when, where, why”. There are two possible types of the errors, the Interlingua errors and the Interlingua errors. The Interlingua errors are affected by native language in writing and speaking and the intralingua errors are due to their misunderstanding of the language they learned.