Toward A Behaviorism-based Systemic Approach To Manipulating Chinese Transfer In Elementary School EFL Teaching

In the recent years,EFL teaching in China's elementary schools has made considerable progress,but still suffers from various problems such as more negative than positive Chinese transfer in the Chinese learners' EFL learning.Therefore,it is important to explore feasible strategies for manipulating Chinese transfer in elementary school EFL teaching.Meanwhile,the study of strategies for managing first language transfer has made gratifying achievements up to now,but is limited by such weaknesses as negligence of designing strategies for manipulating first language transfer in elementary school EFL teaching,one-sided guidelines,new but inappropriate bases,and overuse of empirical approaches.It is thus necessary to carry out more comprehensive studies of managing Chinese transfer in elementary school EFL teaching.Within such a setting,the present study firstly formulates a behaviorism-based systemic strategy system for manipulating Chinese transfer in elementary school EFL teaching through a rational approach,applying systemic thinking as guideline,classical behaviorist learning and teaching theories as main bases and mentalism and constructivism as references.The proposed strategy system comprises a systemic meta-strategy and some strategies for manipulating Chinese phonetic,lexical,syntactic and cultural transfer.Among them,the systemic meta-strategy is a special strategy based on systemic thinking for organizing strategies for managing Chinese phonetic,lexical,syntactic and cultural transfer.Strategies for manipulating Chinese phonetic transfer may include such measures as distinguishing English and Chinese phonetic properties and pitch systems,and assigning adequate phonetic exercises;strategies for manipulating Chinese lexical transfer include distinguishing English and Chinese words,and talking in English and Chinese words in class;strategies for manipulating Chinese syntactic transfer include comparing English and Chinese syntactic features;and strategies for managing Chinese cultural transfer include knowing about English cultures and creating an English cultural atmosphere.Subsequently,the present study verifies the effects of the proposed approach by conducting a 1-semester experiment composed of a pre-survey and pretest,a period(about four months)of strategy application,and a post-survey and post-test,using as its subjects of study a semi-random selection of 70 students in the fourth grade from a certain elementary school in China,employing Chinese transfer questionnaires and English proficiency tests as instruments of data collection.Results generated from data analysis demonstrate that the proposed strategy system has helped to effectively(1)control the process of Chinese transfer in elementary school EFL teaching and(2)increase the students' EFL learning efficiency.Hopefully,the findings of this study is practically significant to elementary school EFL teaching in that it will provide a strategy system for manipulating Chinese transfer with certain verified effects.At the same time,this study is also academically meaningful in that it may help to improve such weaknesses in relevant research as the negligence of designing strategies for managing language transfer in elementary school EFL teaching,lack of a systemic guideline,preference of new but inadequate theoretical bases,and overuse of empirical procedures in comparison to theoretical approaches.