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A Case Study of Chinese EFL Learners’ Acquisition of Relative Clause Through Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis By Peng Liling Shanghai Maritime University June 2006 Acknowledgement First of all, I would like to express hearty thanks to my supervisor Zhang Haiying, who made this thesis possible. She has given me invaluable suggestions and insightful comments, and guided me through the accomplishment of this thesis. I am deeply impressed by her strictness and erudition. My special gratitude also goes to Professor Wang Juquan. With his rich experience in the field of comparison between English and Chinese, he provided me with a lot of instructive and valuable suggestions. I should also thank Professor Zheng Lixin, whose insightful and vivid classes on General Linguistics are always a source of inspiration to me. And I would like to thank all my teachers who also gave me many instructions during classes. The accomplishment of this thesis also owes a great deal to Professor Han Zhonghua and Professor Wang Dawei. Their help and encouragement both in study and everyday life serve the great impetus for all of us. Last but not least, I would like to thank my friends, classmates, especially my roommates with whom I can share worries, frustration and happiness during my work on the thesis. And I want to extend my sincere thanks to my classmates Yan Jie and Lu Yanqi, who are so kindhearted to help me accomplish the most important part of my thesisquestionnaire, without which, there is no way to carry on with my paper. Abstract This present thesis intends to apply contrastive analysis (CA) to the study of Chinese college students’ production of relative clauses and adopt error analysis to test whether the students’ errors result from the differences between their native language (NL) and foreign language (FL) or from other factors. The thesis first introduces the background, purposes and organization of the research and gives a brief ac