A Study Of Cross-linguistic Influence Of L2(English) Proficiency On L3(Chinese) Beginners’ Lexical Acquisition

With the globalization of the world economy and the increasing frequency of international exchanges,more and more attention has been paid to the cross-linguistic influence of third language acquisition research.At present,foreign studies on the cross-linguistic influence of third language acquisition cover a wide range,most of which are Indo European languages with similar language types,and few involve Asian languages,especially Chinese in Sino Tibetan languages.In contrast,there are not only few studies on cross-linguistic influence of third language acquisition in China,but also the narrow range of research subject,which is mainly divided into ethnic minorities and foreign language majors.With the development of “one belt,one road”,more and more countries begin to attach importance to Chinese teaching,and the career of teaching Chinese as a foreign language is also prosperous gradually,and the group of foreign students learning Chinese has gradually attracted the attention of scholars.Among them,Li Zengyin(2017:107)mentioned that “one of the inadequacies of domestic research on third language acquisition research is the neglect of foreign students learning Chinese.” Therefore,it is necessary to carry out the research on the cross-linguistic influence of Chinese as a third language,which can not only fill in the gap on the domestic TLA and enrich the TLA in china,but also provide guidance and enlightenment for the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.Therefore,this thesis regards 40 students of Chinese elective courses of Ternopil National Pedagogical University in Ukraine as the research subjects to conduct an empirical study of the cross-linguistic influence with the Error Analysis,SPSS 17.0 software is used to combine quantitative and qualitative methods,aiming to explore the influence of L2(English)proficiency on Chinese beginners’ lexical acquisition,and to solve the following three research questions:1.What is the correlation between L2(English)proficiency and L3(Chinese)beginners’ proficiency and L3(Chinese)beginners’ lexis proficiency?2.What is the influence of L2(English)proficiency on L3(Chinese)beginners’ lexical acquisition?3.What causes cross-linguistic influence of L2(English)on L3(Chinese)lexical acquisition?In order to answer the three questions,first of all,this paper analyzes the correlation between L2(English)proficiency and L3(Chinese)proficiency as well as L3(Chinese)lexis proficiency,so as to explore whether there exists correlation between the L2(English)proficiency and L3(Chinese)proficiency and L3(Chinese)lexis proficiency.Secondly,according to the proficiency of L2(English),the subjects are divided into two groups,and then the cross-linguistic influence of L2(English)proficiency on L3(Chinese)lexical acquisition is discussed,mainly in three aspects.The first aspect,it explores the relevance between L2(English)proficiency and L3(Chinese)lexical acquisition.The second aspect,the relationship between the acquisition of phonetics,morphology and semantics and L2(English)proficiency is discussed.The third aspect,through the above analysis,I find the uniqueness of speech acquisition,so I further explore phonetic acquisition.According to the characteristics of Chinese Phonetics,I divide phonetics,namely Pinyin,into the spelling of initials and finals and tone,and respectively discuss the relationship between spelling acquisition and tone acquisition with L2(English)proficiency.Finally,based on the results of lexical test,questionnaire and semi-structured interview,the paper analyzes the main factors that affect Chinese vocabulary acquisition.The results show that: firstly,L2(English)proficiency is positively correlated with L3(Chinese)proficiency and L3(Chinese)lexis proficiency.Secondly,for the beginners of L3(Chinese),L2(English)proficiency has a significant impact on the L3(Chinese)lexical acquisition.Those with a low proficiency of L2(English)are inclined to have a negative transfer of L3(Chinese)lexical acquisition,including the negative transfer of phonetics,morphology and semantics,and the negative transfer is most likely to occur in morphology,followed by phonetics and semantics.Among them,L2(English)proficiency has a significant impact on phonetic acquisition,but has no significant impact on morphological and semantic acquisition.Therefore,the influence of L2(English)proficiency on phonetic acquisition is discussed and find that the L2(English)proficiency has an impact on tone acquisition,but has no impact on spelling acquisition,and the lower L2(English)proficiency is,the more likely to cause negative transfer of tone.Thus,we can conclude that L2(English)proficiency is related with L3(Chinese)proficiency,L3(Chinese)lexis proficiency and L3(Chinese)lexical acquisition.And L2(English)proficiency has a significant impact on the tone acquisition of phonetic acquisition,but has no significant impact on morphological and semantic acquisition,and moreover Chinese character writing and tone learning are the most difficult parts.Finally,the results of lexical test,questionnaire and semi-structured interview shows that the main factors that affect L3(Chinese)beginners’ lexical acquisition are L2 proficiency,psychotypology and L2 status.The study of cross-linguistic influence with Chinese as the third language is of great significance not only in theory but also in practice.Theoretically,it can enrich the research of Chinese trilingual which is rarely involved in TLA,and it also expands the range of research subjects of domestic TLA in some extent.In practice,this paper has a certain guiding significance in teaching Chinese as a foreign language,and can provide teaching strategies for Chinese vocabulary teaching to help students improve the efficiency of third language acquisition.