Introduction When speaking or writing an L2, the learner is often found to try to avoid using difficult words or structures, and use some simpler words or structures instead. This phenomenon in L2 learning/acquisition is termed ?avoidance behaviour? first brought to light by Schachter (1974). According to Kleinmann (1977, 1978), avoidance behabiour is a strategy that the L2 learner may resort to when, with the knowledge of a target language word or structure, he/she perceives that it is difficult to produce. To investigate whether the L2 learner adopts avoidance strategy, why he/she adopts this strategy and how this strategy affects performance in an L2 is momentous since both the L2 forms consistently avoided by the learner and those actually produced by him/her are two important aspects of a developmental manifestation of interlanguage from avoidance to nonavoidan anti-aging cream ce (Liao and Fukuya 2004). Though the literature on avoidance behabiour in L2 learning/acquisition is still inadequate, it is evident that avoidance behabiour exists in and has some sort of influence on L2 performance. Schachter (1974) conducted a study with some native speakers of Japanese, Chinese, Arabian and Persian learners of English as a foreign language. The investigation reveals that the difficulty of relative clauses for Chinese and Japanese learners manifests itself not in the number of errors committed by these two groups of learners, but in the number of relative clauses produced. And the number is considerably smaller than that produced by the Arabian and Persian learners. The study concludes that if a learner finds some particular construction in the target language difficult to understand it is likely that he/she tries to avoid using or producing it.
