A Study Of Positive Transfer Of Mongolian In Mongolian Students' English Learning

Language transfer has always been a central issue for at least a century in applied linguistics and second language acquisition. Since the end of the 1980s, with the deepening of transfer study, the research on cross-linguistic influence between Chinese and English has attracted much more attention by researchers in China. Furthermore, with the increase of cross-linguistic influence study in china, language transfer from minority languages to English have become a new focus in this field.Language transfer, in this specific context, is the role of Mongolian plays in learning English as a foreign language. Many scholars have often held the view that Mongolian plays a negative role in learners'English learning. Therefore, they strongly urge to avoid the interference of Mongolian in English learning. As Chomsky's Universal Grammar mentioned that all the languages have some similarities, the author of this thesis believes that there exist great deals of similarities between Mongolian and English in many perspectives of phonetics, lexicon, and lexical semantics and so on. In this sense, it is safe to assume that the positive functions of Mongolian in English learning are still not studied and revealed in a comprehensive manner. How does learner's mother tongue Mongolian influence the acquisition of English? From the cognitive-psychological perspective, Mongolians have experienced their mother tongue acquisition and have built their recognition of the world. Therefore, they are familiar with the language learning process as well as the social experiences around them. Both of them provide useful language learning experiences. From the linguistic perspective, Mongolian learners are supported by their mother tongue in many aspects in English learning. They can find similarities and facilitate positive transfer through comparison between Mongolian and English. The present study focuses on the positive role of mongolian in Mongolian student's English learning, discusses the cross-linguistic influence and finds the possibilities of positive transfer and the factors constrain the positive transfer from both linguistic and cognitive-psychological perspectives.This thesis, based on the previous research in transfer, tries to give a detailed and specific explanation about the similarities between Mongolian and English languages in the aspects of phonetic and lexicon. Through the language similarity test and language background questionnaire, the author discusses the positive functions of Mongolian in learners'English learning, which have been overshadowed by its negative ones for a long time, with a purpose to shed some enlightenments on both the teachers'side as well as the learners'...