A Study On Mother Tongue Transfer On Vocabulary Acquisition In Senior High School

Vocabulary acquisition is the foundation of English teaching in Senior high school. The famous English linguist named Wilkins(1972)once said:’One can express limited information without grammar, while one can express nothing without vocabulary., from which we can see how vital the position of vocabulary is in English teaching. At the same time, one’s word base is one of the judging instruments of one’s English level. The number of the words that high school students should master is increasing with the level of their grade. In the daily teaching of English,both teachers and the students pay lots of attention on vocabulary acquisition,the former of which spent much time in introducing all kinds of word while the latter of which always memorize vocabularies simply by rote drilling. However, hard they may have been, the result of their effort turned out to be inefficient. So there must be some problems with their ways of teaching and learning.The author focused on the problems existing in middle school English teaching and use Error Analysis Theory to classify the errors relating with vocabulary acquisition into different categories and analysis them to find the real reason of these errors. At last, the author found that mother tongue exerted an irresistible influence that cannot be neglected on vocabulary acquisition in high school English learning.This kind of influence can be divided into promotion and inhibition, also called mother tongue positive transfer and negative transfer in linguistics. Research on mother tongue has a long history, and Rod.Ellis, the internationally famous applied linguist, was the first one to use the term negative transfer and positive transfer in linguistics.According to him, mother tongue transfer refers to the process of using knowledge of the first language in learning a second language.In recent years, researches on mother transfer become more and more popular and the focus of the researches is mainly about transfer on English writing and speaking. However, no matter speaking or writing,the foundation is vocabulary acquisition. So the author did a research on mother tongue transfer on vocabulary acquisition in high school, hoping to promote the development of English in high school by investigating the main forms of errors relating with vocabulary acquisition and finding the reason of them.The whole paper is divided into5parts.In the first part,the author presented the research background and the significance of the thesis and the general description of it.In the second part,the author talked about the relevant theories about transfer including the definition and classification of transfer,and language transfer,including its definition and classification and theories like Contrastive Analysis, and Error Analysis,and the relevant theories at home and abroad. In the third part, the author put forward the research objective, questions, and methodology, instrument, object, and procedures, among which the research questions are as follows:1) What are the types of errors made by high school students in their vocabulary acquisition? And what are the main causes of these errors? What kinds of errors are caused by mother tongue transfer? What are the proportions of them2) In what aspect does the mother tongue influence the vocabulary acquisition in senior high school?3)What can we do to overcome the negative transfer and make full use of positive transfer of mother tongue? Also the author talked about the validity and reliability of the research. The author used3instruments, namely, questionnaire, analysis of the composition samples and interview, among which the interview is used as a complementary instrument to help the author get the firsthand information of the subjects. In section four, the author presented the result of the research and analysis the errors and then classified the errors into different categories. The author divided the errors into intralingua errors and interlingua errors,the former of which was caused by the incomprehensive or wrong master or understanding of the target language of the language learners,while the latter refers to the errors caused by the influence of the mother tongue negatively and can be divided into grammatical errors which mainly covers13kinds of errors like13kinds of errors like misusage of plural and singular forms of nouns, misuse of articles,misusage of verbs, wrong collocations of phrasal verbs, misuse of passive voice of verbs, misuse of tense of verbs, misuse of articles, Misusage of capital and small letters, misuse of pronouns, adjectives disorder, misusage of preposition,misuse of part of speech, absence of objects, wrong collocations of prepositional phrases,and semantic errors the main form of which is Chinglish which is grammatically right but not suitable for the speaking habit or culture of the target language. Chinglish is the most representative errors of mother tongue transfer. In section five the author made a conclusion of the research and present some suggestions on making full use of positive mother transfer and avoiding negative transfer, hoping that the research can draw the attention of teachers and students on mother tongue transfer and use the relevant transfer theory to improve the efficiency of English and learning of senior high school.