A Study On Reverse Negative Transfer In Third Language Acquisition

With the development of economic globalization, more and more learners in the modern society take up learning a third language. In the dynamic process of the third language acquisition, learners would encounter issues related to English and Japanese transfer. In the process of the third language acquisition, L2(e.g. English) learning will be affected by the negative transfer influence from L3(e.g. Japanese), which plays an impeditive role in hindering the second and third language learning. Therefore, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the transfers from the third language to the second language.This study elaborates a comparative analysis of the second and the third language acquisition theories, the transfer theory and the contrastive analysis hypothesis, and aims to explore the following questions:(1) In the process of English learning, does reverse negative transfer actually occur from Japanese(L3) to English(L2) ?(2) Among the lexical, phonetic and syntactic aspects, which kind of the aspect has greater reverse negative transfer influence on English?(3) How does L3 Japanese learning duration lead to L2 English learning differences in phonetic and syntactic aspects? This study selects 60 undergraduates(Japanese major juniors and Science major juniors 30respectively) as the subjects in the first experiment, and 4 undergraduates(Japanese major freshmen and seniors 2 respectively) as the subjects in the second experiment.Based on the investigation of 64 subjects’ English learning condition, Experiment One uses questionnaire, phrase translation of Chinese-English and discourse reading research tools; Experiment Two collects speech data by way of pictures and writing asresearch tools. The research method adopted is a combination of quantitative analysis,qualitative analysis and case study.Through the analysis of the relevant data, this study arrives at conclusions as follows:(1) in the process of English learning, Japanese(L3) does exert a reverse negative transfer influence on English(L2);(2) reverse negative transfer influence is mainly reflected in the vocabulary, pronunciation and syntax, and in the phonetic and syntactic fields, Japanese has greater influence on English;(3) in the phonetic and syntactic aspects, the longer Japanese(L3) learning duration, the more significant influence on English learning. And the points of focus on the influence are quite different.The practical significance of this study lies in the fact that, on one hand, it can help learners grasp a full understanding of the characteristics of English and Japanese from lexical, phonetic and syntactic levels, to improve the learning efficiency; on the other hand, in the actual teaching and learning process, effective strategies can be employed to deal with complex phenomena of reverse negative transfers.