Abstract: The occurrence of rock avalanche always brings disastrous catastrophes because of its high speed and unexpected long runout. So,its kinematics or moving mechanism has been the focus of engineering geologists around the world since late 19th century. At present,there are four viewpoints abroad: air-lubrication model,grain flow model,momentum-transfer model and self-undrained loading model. Howver,they have not been widely accepted possibly because of complication. China is a country where frequent rock avalances occur. The research on this field is just at the beginning and most of the research results are qualitative. Based on a review of a plenty of literatures,this paper expounds the development status of study on the transport mechanism of rock avalanches in two aspects of theories and research techniques. It summarizes the existing numerous models,comments on the research difficulties at present. Finally,it puts forward the research directions in the future according to the present bottlenecks. This paper systematically sums up the relevant research status and can be helpful to the future research.