Discourse And Syntactic Transfer In ESL Writing

This paper will review the broad issue of language transfer and empirical studies are carried out to examine language transfer on the discourse and syntactic level in the writing of ESL college students. Language transfer is the result of the differences and the similarities between the two languages, as the learner perceives them. Contrastive analysis is a valuable tool for the study of language transfer by making explicit the differences and the similarities between the languages and cultures. In light of the distinction between the declarative and procedural transfer, the cultural schemata and the formation of certain structures in his native language are often transferred procedurally to the learner's L2 production. The present study which is based on the textual analysis of the ESL writing produced by the Chinese college students will set out to examine how the discourse and syntactic features of the ESL learners'L1 (Chinese) influence their L2 (English) writing. The Chinese language has what is called the bamboo syntactic structure whereas English has the tree syntactic structure. The relative clauses in Chinese are prenominal and shorter while their English counterparts are postnominal and much more complex. The results of the study indicate that the traditional Chinese discourse patterns are transferred to the students'ESL writing and that the students'production of English RC constructions is influenced by the structural features and rhetorical style of their L1. The pedagogical implication of the study is that in ESL classes, the teacher should raise the students'awareness of the sociocultural aspect of the English language and that greater emphasis should be placed on the proceduralization of the language structures.