Effects Of Transfer On The Production Of English Sentence Patterns By Chinese Learners

The author of this dissertation attempts to study the effects of transfer, namely, the influence of similarities and differences between the L1 (Chinese) and the L2 (English) on the learning of sentence patterns by Chinese learners in their EFL writing and how the effects of transfer change as learners become more proficient in the target language. 89 writing samples were collected from CET 4 and CET 6, which were divided into three groups-lower level, intermediate level, advanced level-in terms of scores of each sample. About nine variables were established: simple sentence, adverbial clause, relative clause, object clause, subject clause, predicative clause, appositive clause, compound sentence, and incomplete sentence. To find what other factors interact with transfer, a EFL Writing Questionnaire was administered to 51 students. Findings of this research confirm the claim that similarities between the L1 and the L2 can be facilitative, however, the hidden differences disguised as salient similarities may lead to negative transfer (for example, overproduction). Differences between the two languages do not necessarily result in negative transfer as the salient differences can be helpful in the learning of the target language. Language transfer is more likely to occur at lower levels of proficiency than at the advanced level.