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Syntactic Transfer: Viewed From Students' English Sentences In Middle School

Posted on:2006-03-12Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:W H LiFull Text:PDF
GTID:2167360155466746Subject:English Language and Literature
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Syntactic transfer is very popular in the field of second language acquisition. This paper will probe into the nature of syntactic transfer by a systematic analysis of the data obtained from 400 students at different proficiency levels from Zhoujia Middle School in Zibo, Shandong province. The influence of mother tongue on English writing in syntactic level will be clearly shown.In Chapter one, the literature review gives us a clear show of the starting and development of the study of language transfer and point out the necessity to do much experimental research in large scale concerning this field in middle school. In chapter two, language transfer is analyzed from both cognitive and behaviorist perspective. Chapter Three makes classification of language transfer from the form and content perspective respectively. Five syntactic structures involved in this research are compared between English and Chinese forms. Chapter Four introduced the research conducted in class in the middle school. Three methodologies were mainly used respectively: self-reporting in individual interviews, translation (both with and without prompts), and grammaticality judgment. In this article, the focus of the study is on the following five error types: a) failure to use the correct word order in narrative sentences b) inability to use the correct negation placement in statement c) confusion in distribution of negation in tag questions d) wrong use of wh-replacement e) confusion in dealing with relative clause. The results show that many English learners in middle school have the tendency to think in Chinese first before they write in English. Besides this, the surface structures of many of their interlanguage strings produced by the participants are identical or very similar to the usual or normative sentence structures of the learner's first language (L1), Mandarin. The extent of syntactic transfer is particularly large for complex target language structures and among learners of comparatively lower proficiency level, although the high-proficiency level English learners may also have resorted to the syntax and vocabulary of their previously acquired linguistic repertoire, their L1, when they find it very difficult to produce output in the target language. Further discussion is carriedout in Chapter Five and thus leads to the implication in English teaching. According to the comparison of the five syntactic structures and the error analysis, teachers in English class can make improvement efficiently with the aid of the research. Chapter Six displays the limitations of this research and shows us the way to the future study in this field.
Keywords/Search Tags:syntactic transfer, mother tongue, second language acquisition, influence, positive transfer, negative transfer
PDF Full Text Request
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