Underproduction and Overproduction

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

Linguistics · Overproduction · Physics · Computer Science · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Philosophy · Psychology · Second Language Acquisition and Learning · Second Language Learning and Teaching