A Study Of Positive Transfer On Junior High School Students In English Lexicon Learning

The theory of language transfer originates from1940s in America. Ithas gone through three periods: the period of contrastive analysishypothesis, he period of early interlanguage theory and the period ofrecent interlanguage theory. From the historical development of thistheory we can discover that though the study of language transfer hasgone through many changes, it is these researches that established theunshakable role of language transfer in the domain of second languageacquisition. Language transfer has considered as one of the mostimportant notions in the field of second language acquisition.Language transfer can be classified into negative transfer and positivetransfer. Negative transfer, also named as “language interference”, whichmeans that learners’ existing knowledge impede the process of secondlanguage learning. The former is caused by the similarities shared bysource language and target language, the latter is attributed to thedifferences between two languages. Over the past fifty years, lots ofstudies on negative transfer have been done. However, very little has beendone on positive transfer, let along the empirical study.However, from the dialectical point of view, we can not neglect thefacilitate role of mother tongue in second language acquisition. Recently,linguists abroad and home have called on that we should attach importance to the study of positive transfer (Wen Qiufang,2010;Jarivs&Pavlenko,2008). They put forward that native language canpromote students’ understanding of second language. In the process ofsecond language learning, especially for Junior High School students, theknowledge of native language can help students to complete their tasks.When learning the target language, they will unconsciously use theprevious information to think and achieve the purpose of second languagelearning. Native language plays a fundamental role in second languagelearning. For students, it can facilitate the study of second language insome extent.Vocabulary is the foundation of language. As the beginning stage,English teaching in Junior high school should give priority to vocabularylearning. Then, whether Chinese plays a facilitate role in the process ofstudents’ vocabulary learning? And if it has, what are the factors thatinfluence language transfer? What teaching methods can teacheremployed to students’ vocabulary learning? These are main contents ofthis study.Based on the comprehensive analysis from existing research, thisexperiment want to explore whether there exist positive transfer in theprocess of the learning of Chinese adjective “好”（good）. Through dataanalysis we get the following conclusions.1) If L2learners’ semantic space contains different but related senses of a word. There exists the probability assigned by learners to whichsense should be used in English in the first place. This probability istermed transferability of a sense by Kellerman and there are both positiveand negative ones.2) The structure of L2learners’ semantic space could be expressedby two dimensions, that is, markedness and concreteness. Markednessbear closely with learner’s perceptions of the type “sense1> sense2>sense3……>sense n”, that is, sense1is more likely to be used comparedwith sense2, and the next successively.3) Though we can not exclude L2knowledge, transferability isestablished completely based on the L1specific characteristics, ratherthan that of L2’s.4) Positive transfer tends to happen when L2learners receivedpositive hints and guides; when learner’s detected the close distancebetween L1and L2; when learner used facilitate learning strategies. Hintscan facilitate the transferability of metaphoric senses rather than commonsenses. Improper hints maybe counterproductive.Through this research we can also get some pedagogicalimplications: teachers should introduce the transfer theory so thatstudents can have a comprehensive understanding on mother tongue.Teachers should also let students realize the facilitating role of mothertongue. This study is the empirical study on positive transfer and it enrichesthe transfer theory. Through this study we will have a morecomprehensive understanding on transfer theory and we can providesome helpful suggestions on lexical teaching. However, this experiment isjust a tentative study on language transfer. Due to many limitations, thestudy of this paper is far from comprehensive and many problems stillwait for further exploration.