Grammatical Strategies for Clause Combining and the Acquisition by Chinese EFL Learners

Grammar instruction has long been an important task in foreign language teaching to foster students' grammatical competence. However, in terms of sentence grammar, the current grammar instruction gives preference to teaching the usage of certain syntactic patterns, while ignoring the clause-complex-level grammar that governs clause combing. As a result, students may encounter difficulties when organizing several clauses into a clause complex, and thus fail to produce long sentence of high quality. To unveil the issue, this study proposed a classification system for grammatical clause-combining strategies under the Clause Complex Theory, and explored how Chinese EFL learners master four subtypes of grammatical strategies based on the CLEC corpus. The error analysis reveals that unfamiliarity of the strategies and the negative transfer of mother language are two main reasons for the misuses of grammatical clause-combining strategies. Hence, a systematic grammar instruction on the clause complex level is called for, so as to improve Chinese EFL learners' ability to write structurally-correct clause complexes.