Language transfer 语言迁移.doc

Negative Transfer in Foreign Language LearningAbstractAccording to the language transfer theory, it is assumed that the learners mother tongue will positively or negatively affect ones learning a foreign language. When there are differences between ones mother tongue and target language, the mother tongue tends to interfere with the learning of the foreign language. This paper attempts to give a brief analysis of negative transfer in students pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and culture learning. It also discusses what pedagogical concerns the existence of negative transfer warrants and what learners can do to reduce the influence of negative transfer. Key words: Native language, Negative transfer, pedagogical implication1. IntroductionLanguage transfer has been an important issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and language learning. When language learners have been using their native language for many years, they are very likely to transfer those roles in their mother tongue into the foreign language that they are learning. Thats what we call negative transfer. Therefore, differences between the native language and the foreign language should be taken into consideration to find out what difficulties might be. At the same time, teachers as well as learners should come up with solutions to reduce the influence of negative transfer. 2. Defining negative transferLanguage transfer refers to speakers or writers applying knowledge from their native language to a second language. When the relevant unit or structure of both languages is the same, linguistic interference can result in correct language production called positive transfer. However, that language interference is most often discussed as a source of errors known as negative transfer. Negative transfer occurs when speakers and writers transfer items and structures that are not the same in both languages. Within the theory of contrastive analysis, the greater the differences between the two languages, the more negative transfer can be expected.3. Manifestations of the negative transfer in English learning 3.1 Negative transfer in pronunciation When people hear a speaker with a “foreign accent”, they often try to guess the speakers background. Often the clue seems to be how the individual talks. In such cases, questions put to the speaker such as “Are you German?” “Are you Spanish?” or “Are you Asian?” suggest an intuition about the nature of language, an awareness, however unconscious, that the native language of a speaker can somehow cause the individual to sound “foreign” in speaking another language. The detection of foreign accents is one example of the awareness that people often have of language transfer in pronunciation. 3.1.1 Negative transfer in segmental levelSome difficulties in pronouncing inaccurately are caused by the non-existence of the phonemes in the mother tongue. Take /v/ and / for an example. Many English learners mispronounce them as they do not exist in Mandarin, and their mistakes can be attributed to the similarity of these two sounds with Chinese w and s. Chinese learners performances on the sound of /æ/ are not quite satisfying, for the phoneme is often replaced by e, a sound that is close to Chinese ai, and thus happiness or apple is mispronounced by many learners. Two languages also frequently have sounds which may seem identical but which in fact are acoustically different and may be perceived to be divergent from the target by the listener. For example, a comparison of an English d with a Saudi Arabian Arabic d shows several differences. Among the differences, the duration of an English d at the end of a word tends to be shorter than its Arabic counterpart. 3.1.2 Negative transfer in suprasegmental levelAlthough cross-linguistic influences on pronunciation frequently involve segmental contrasts, the influences are also frequently evident in suprasegmental contrasts involving stress, tone, rhythm, and other factors. Stress patterns are crucial in pronunciation in English since they affect syllables in English between certain nouns and verbs, such as between combine COMbine and comBINE. The first syllable in these two words has a different vowel sound, with the sound varying according to the acoustic prominence of the syllable. Such interactions have important implications not only for speech production but also for comprehension. When non-native speakers do not use a stress pattern that is a norm in the target language, this can result in a total misperception by listeners. Every English word has a definite place for the stress and one is not allowed to change it.  In Chinese, stress does not have great influence. Thus stress errors are frequently committed by a Chinese learner. One of the most important typological distinctions between languages involves tone and intonation. Chinese is a “tone language”. It has four tones, that is, the level tone, the rising tone, the falling-rising tone and the falling tone. The syllable “ma” represents “mother” when it is used with a high level tone, and “horse” with a low rising tone. In contrast, English words have no fixed tones and their meanings are not identified by tones. In fact, the words in English sentences are influenced by different intonation. Different intonation can express different communicative intentions, attitudes and emotions. In other words, the meaning of a word in one English sentence not only has the meaning of vocabulary but also the meaning of the corresponding intonation. When Chinese students read English sentences, they are apt to replace the English intonation with fixed lexical tones instead of subordinating the lexical tones to the sentence intonation. As a result, every English word is pronounced clearly. Thus, the flexibility of English words is destroyed.3.2 Negative transfer in vocabularyA fundamental issue in the study of semantic transfer is the relation between language and thought. Expressions such as “learning to think in English” reflect a common belief that learning a particular language requires adopting a worldview which, to some extent, is unique to that language. When Chinese learners start learning English, they have been equipped with the deep-rooted Chinese way of thinking and their mother tongue inevitably influences their learning, especially the learning of vocabulary.3.2.1 The negative transfer caused by the non-equivalent conceptual meaning of wordsThe conceptual meaning is also called denotative or cognitive meaning, is the essential and inextricable part of what language is, and is widely regarded as the central factor in verbal communication. The negative transfer often occurs when there is only a partial identity of conceptual meaning. “It was quite warm when I got here, but the climate suddenly changed.” “Climate” refers to the average weather conditions at a particular place over a period of years, but in this sentence, the change means the particular condition at a certain time, so “weather” is the correct choice. To some students, these two words have the same conceptual meaning. Its hard for them to tell the difference so that they usually take it for granted that these two words could be used indiscriminately.Lets look at another example. “He also studies French except English. “Except” means “but not, leaving out”. So “except English” means that English is not the subject he is learning. But when we look at the second word “also”, its obvious that the word “except” is not correct. “Besides” should be the right answer as it means “as well as”. Chinese learners tend to mix up the conceptual meanings of these two words for they not perceive the distinction between them.3.2.2 The negative transfer caused by the non-equivalent connotative meaning of word Connotative meaning is the communicative value that a word or a combination of words has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. Compared with conceptual meaning, connotative meaning is peripheral, and relatively unstable, that is, it may vary according to culture, historical period, and the experience of the individual. When we study English, we usually memorize a group of words such as grin, beam, smile and smirk. They are all types of smile. The real differences between them lie in their connotative meanings. Beam is a smile which connotes happiness, while smirk is a smile which connotes gloating of some kind. Most Chinese learners find it hard to distinguish the connotative meanings of words, especially words which are called synonyms. In compositions, some learners use the word “peasant” which has a derogatory meaning in the present English dictionary. It refers to persons without education or manners. If someone uses this word in their communication, they hold contempt on that person. Therefore, westerners prefer to use the word “farmer.” Without knowing the connotative meaning of different words, learners are very likely to commit mistakes.3.3 Negative transfer in grammarThere are often grammatical restrictions found in one language but not in another and such restrictions can occasion difficulty. A French-speaking student may make a sentence like this: At sixty-five years old they must retire themselves because this is a rule of society. While the form “retire” reflects a true French-English cognate, the French lexical item has a grammatical restriction that the ESL student applied erroneously to the English form- the use of the reflexive pronoun is necessary in French, whereas the use of the English reflexive themselves is not grammatical in the context of the sentence. 3.3.1 Negative transfer in Syntax levelA great deal of evidence has been found for syntactic negative transfer in studies of word order, relative clauses, and negation.3.3.1.1 Word orderWord order has been one of the most intensively studied syntactic properties in linguistics. “Japanese learners of English do not at any time produce writing in which the verb is wrongly placed sentence-finally.” When the Japanese speak English, many times they put objects before verbs since the basic order of Japanese is SOV and the basic order of English SVO. The vast majority of human languages have CSO, SVO, or SOV as their basic word order. Yet while most languages can be compared in terms of these three patterns, they vary considerably in terms of rigidity. Speakers of a flexible language may use several word orders in English even though English word order is quite rigid. Finnish is a flexible SVO language. Speakers of Finnish may make such a sentence “This weekend got F. any fish” when they actually want to express that “This weekend F. caught no fish”. The sentence made by a French “I think its very good the analysis between the behavior of animals and the person” also reflect the relatively flexible word order of French. Chinese also has SVO as its basic order but its relatively flexible compared with English. Other constituents besides S, V, and O are also subject to word-order rules. In noun phrases in English, for example, articles normally precede adjectives and nouns in the noun phrase and languages generally have rules specifying the occurrence of elements within noun phrases, verb phrases and other constituents. Since the rules governing the position of adjectives, adverbs, and other word classes vary considerably form one language to the next, it is natural to expect to find cases of word-order negative transfer in constituents. There is a strong tendency for Chinese speakers to follow Chinese instead of English norms for the replacement of adverbial elements, as seen in the following error: I very much like movies. From this we can see that native language influence does account well for the vast majority of the errors. 3.3.1.2 Relative clausesEnglish primarily relies on a right branching direction, in which the relative clauses appear to the right of the head noun. In contrast, Chinese primarily relies on a left branching direction, in which modifying clauses appear to the left of the head noun. And the differences in branching directions favored in relative clause patterns occasion underproduction. Most Chinese learners seem to have often avoided using relative clauses in written compositions; in contrast, equally proficient students who speak Arabic and Persian used many more such clauses. Although the Arabic and Persian speakers produce a great number of errors in the relative clauses that they use, the similarity of patterns in the native and target languages apparently led them to attempt writing more sentences with relative constructions. In the case of relative clauses, another crucial factor is the grammatical role of nouns and pronouns. Restrictive relativization is a construct usually having a “domain noun” and invariably having a modifying clause. For example, the sentence “The musician who played at the concert is from China” has a relative construction consisting of a domain noun and a clause modifying the noun. One of the most common patterns in relative clauses is to have within the clause a pronoun with the same reference as the domain noun. This poses a great difficulty for Chinese who learn English. There is considerable cross-linguistic variation in relative clause structures, and such variation occasions negative transfer. 3.3.2 Negative transfer in semantic levelChinese and English belong to different language families. Thus there is a huge difference between the two grammatical systems. Chinese learners are prone to apply the grammatical rules of Chinese in their English learning. As a result, grammatical mistakes are frequently committed when Chinese learners study English. Chinese nouns have no plural forms and changing nouns into their plural forms is not easy for Chinese learners. They tend to decide the plural forms of English nouns based on Chinese abstract and non-abstract nouns. Usually errors would appear, such as “a good advice”, “a bad news”, “a fine weather”, “some changes”, “five equipments”, etc. On the other hand, some Chinese nouns are abstract, while the corresponding English nouns are countable and they have plural forms, such as “goods”, “table manners”, “many thanks”, “in high spirits”, etc. Influenced by the usage of the Chinese equivalent of “marry”, a lot of learners make sentences like “She married with a poor man.” The learner clearly thinks that the verb “marry” is intransitive as it is used this way in Chinese. It actually is a transitive verb in English. So we are supposed to say “She married a poor man”. Take the verb “serve” as another example. In Chinese way of thinking, the sentence goes like this: He serves for the people. But again “serve” is a transitive verb; “He serves people” is the correct answer. On the contrary, the Chinese equivalent of “laugh” is transitive while “laugh” is intra