The Effects Of Cross-linguistic Similarity On Negative L1 Transfer In Chinese EFL Learners’ Motion Event Expressions

In the past decades,the issue of the acquisition of motion event expressions has received considerable attention.Motion event expressions are significant in second language acquisition study because they represent the core element of language.Concerning the acquisition of motion event expressions in another language,Cadierno &Robinson(2009),Ji et al.,(2011a),Lewandowski,(2021)and other scholars mainly have studied it from a typological or syntactic,lexical perspective.Nevertheless,most studies have not thoroughly taken cross-linguistic similarity into account to explain its effect on the occurrence of negative L1(first language)transfer in second language learners’ motion event expressions in L2(second language)outcome.Daller et al.(2010)and Hendriks &Hickmann(2015)have mainly focused on languages of different motion event typologies.Despite the extensive research on cross-linguistic similarity,little is known about the effects of cross-linguistic differences between Chinese and English on the accuracy rate and negative native language transfer in Chinese EFL learners’ written English narratives.Hence,the author focuses on the impact of cross-linguistic similarity on Chinese EFL learners’ motion event expressions in English narratives.To achieve that goal,the author collected thirty-six Chinese EFL learners’ written reports in English and Chinese by carrying out a picture-cued writing task and written compositions of thirty-five native speakers provided by Dr Liu.Antconc 3.5.9 was utilised to summarise the narratives,and a log-likelihood ratio test was used to identify the significant differences in the data of the two groups of participants.Through detailed analysis,it was found that Chinese EFL learners applied path verbs more frequently in their English texts.The accuracy rate in congruent Chinese and English motion event expressions was significantly higher than incongruent ones.Through detailed analysis,the author found that the incongruent Chinese and English motion events at the lexical level were highly related to errors.The intrusive transfer in Chinese EFL learners’ written English narratives was related to the incongruent motion event expressions.Besides,the congruence between Chinese and English motion event structures played a facilitative role in controlling the negative L1 transfer.In contrast,the incongruence between Chinese and English motion event expressions,especially the lexical and word-order dissimilarity between Chinese and English motion event expressions,increased the occurrence of negative L1 transfer.This study may contribute to the theory of L1 transfer by providing new empirical data and have pedagogical implications in teaching and learning English motion event expressions for Chinese EFL learners.