A Cognitive Approach To Lexical Negative Transfer Of Non-english Majors

Vocabulary is the foundation of language.Vocabulary learning is therefore the key to language learning.At the time of learning English,Chinese learners have already acquired a solid knowledge of mother tongue and formed the same solid way of thinking in their mother tongue.It is difficult for learners not to be influenced by native way of thinking in learning English vocabulary.English and Chinese are different in many ways as they come from different language families.Learners tend to use native language to express their thoughts before they fully master English vocabulary.Lexical negative transfer takes place in this way.For the sake of improving English instruction quality,it is quite important to help Chinese students develop good habits of thinking,and overcome the negative transfer of native language in English vocabulary learning.For a long time,affected by the lexical negative transfer,English proficiency of non-English majors in universities are generally weak.Lexical negative transfer has a great effect on the improvement of the foreign language education quality.On the basis of comprehensive analysis and existing research,121 students from Yan'an University and Yulin University are taken as subjects.In this paper,test,composition and interview are adopted to examine the current situation of non-English majors' lexical negative transfer.Lexical negative transfer errors are analyzed from four aspects: lexical form,part of speech,lexical collocation and lexical meaning.The author tries to find out the cognitive mechanism of lexical negative transfer with analyzing errors made by learners.In the meanwhile,this paper also puts forward the relevant learning strategies to help students overcome the negative effects of lexical transfer and improve vocabulary acquisition ability.The main conclusions are:(i)the prominent lexical negative transfer errors of non-English majors in the universities of Northern Shaanxi are: equivalence of connotative meaning,equivalence of conceptual meaning and misuse of noun.(ii)Lexical negative transfer results from: shallow semantic processing,learners do not form a complete lexical semantic network;learners failed to construct the non-equivalent schema of conceptual meaning and connotative meaning;the structure and category of L2 is based on the structure and category of native language.If native language is quite different from L2 knowledge in the process of making analogy,inhibitory connection would take place.In this case,it could easily result in lexical negative transfer.To help students overcome the lexical negative transfer and improve ability of vocabulary acquisition,it is better to choose such strategies as constructing lexical semantic network,constructing lexical chunk teaching mode,constructing context schema and cultural background schema.