Abstract: Attributive clauses are mainly described and explained in terms of semantics and pragmatics in traditional college English teaching, from which arise two shortcomings contributing to the difficulty in Chinese students’ acquisition of this grammar. One is that the connectives such as the relative pronoun and the relative adverb are defined in circular argument; the other is that there are no counterparts to these grammatical terms in Chinese. Consequently, Chinese students either avoid attributive clauses where relative adverbs are involved or output attributive clauses by misusing relative pronouns. If viewed from the perspective of morpho-syntax, which, together with semantics and pragmatics, constitutes a linguistic analysis system, the use of attributive clauses in fact is a practical approach to repetition avoidance in English. Hereby, Chinese learners would make better sense of attributive clauses by taking repetition avoidance as a key hint for insight and also would make more natural sentences by taking attributive clauses as a key reference. This approach to the acquisition of attributive clauses adding variety to college English teaching thus has its theoretical and practical values.

Key words: attributive clause, morpho-syntax, repetition avoidance, the key hint for insight, college English teaching