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Positive Language Transfer Of Chinese In English Writing

Posted on:2012-08-03Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:M L TanFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155330335969484Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Language transfer is a significant subject in researches of SLA, applied linguistics and even linguistics since 1950s. It could be divided into positive transfer and negative transfer according to its function in SLA. Negative transfer remains the center of researches in early period. It's not until 1980s that some attention has been paid to positive transfer phenomenon and the related researches began to develop.This paper focuses on the positive transfer phenomenon in English acquisition for Chinese students. To a great extent, positive transfer comes from the similarities between the source language and the target language. When students learn the similar linguistic points, their previously acquired knowledge functions so positively that they find those language points easier to acquire. Therefore, the paper finds out the similarities between Chinese and English from four language levels first:the lexical level, the word order level, the syntactic level and the discourse level, to set a model for data analysis.The process of writing requires students to produce sentence and discourse on their own, thus it could have a comparatively entire reflection of their English proficiency and the influence of positive transfer. Therefore, this paper chooses 35 students'compositions as the research materials. Based on the model of similarities between two languages, the research finds that students could correctly produce the similar language points in most cases in their compositions. This proves that similarities between languages transfer positively in foreign language acquisition.According to the similarities between Chinese and English and its positive reflection in students'compositions, some implications of positive transfer in FLT are put forward: setting a right attitude toward positive transfer, teaching similar parts between the two languages first to lay the foundation for further learning of different parts, and guiding students to do a lot of practice.
Keywords/Search Tags:positive transfer, mother tongue, composition
PDF Full Text Request
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