Cultural Transfer In Chinese ESL Students' Compositions

Over the last few decades, not a few scholars and researchers have studied the phenomenon of transfer in L2 learning. In recent years, some have begun to examine the phenomenon of transfer from a cultural perspective. This transfer, which involves cultural factors, is called cultural transfer. Although no valid and comprehensive theory about cultural transfer has been developed, related research has been done by many scholars. Robert Lado initiated the study of cultural comparison as early as the 1950s. Russian cultural linguists, in the 1970s, attached importance to the interpretation of cultural meanings of Russian. Jenny Thomas studied cross-cultural pragmatic failure in the 1980s. Based on the research related both to cultural transfer, and to the contrastive study of English and Chinese, the present dissertation attempts to interpret the effects of cultural transfer (which mainly refers to cultural interference in this dissertation) on Chinese ESL students' compositions from a cultural perspective, so as to find a workable way to help them reduce the effects of such transfer and become more effective intercultural communicators.Chinese ESL students tend to use patterns of language and stylistic conventions that they have learned in their native language and culture when communicating in English. Although this transfer is unavoidable, it can be reduced through some practical teaching activities, such as offering lectures to construct the two cultural schemata (the macro-leveled schema and the micro-leveled schema), guiding students to read extensively in or after class in order to reinforce the two schemata and assigning pre-writing and pre-revising activities to activate the two schemata. All these teaching activities are aimed at enhancing Chinese students' intercultural awareness. As regards intercultural awareness, the most important issue teachers of intensive reading courses should address is that Chinese students should be trained to be empathetic to the target culture. Being empathetic in the context of ESL writing means encoding English texts according to English cultural norms and the expectations of an English audience. Only through enhancing students' intercultural awareness can the effects of cultural transfer in Chinese students' English compositions be minimized and their produced English texts be more English-like than Chinese-like.The dissertation is divided into six chapters.Chapter One sketches out the thesis and the plan of the dissertation. First, it presents a general account of the study of transfer, which serves as the background of the dissertation. Then, it illustrates through examples that cultural transfer is a common phenomenon in Chinese ESL students' compositions. Finally it discusses the necessity of enhancing Chinese students' intercultural awareness in the teaching of English writing in order to reduce cultural transfer and to develop their intercultural writing ability.Chapter Two first gives a brief review of the research related to cultural transfer. Then, it divides cultural transfer into two layers (the surface-structure cultural transfer and the deep-structure cultural transfer) and identifies the differences between cultural transfer and language transfer. Finally, it points out the origins of cultural transfer.Chapter Three analyzes English and Chinese from a cultural perspective. This analysis is based on the contrastive study of English and Chinese, and is undertaken at three levels (lexical, syntactic, and discourse). The goal of the analysis is to make Chinese students aware of the cultural differences between these two languages so as to avoid making inter-lingual or inter-cultural transfer errors in English production.Chapter Four is the report of the experimental study on cultural transfer in the writing of 80 second-year English majors in Sichuan Teachers' College. The major results of the study reveal that cultural transfer appears less frequently in the compositions of students who know the cultural differences between English and Chine...