An Investigation Into Transfer On The Lahu Students' Native Language Thinking Pattern To Their English Learning

Yunnan is a multinational province, the minority students' English teaching has been a tough work for many teachers for a long time. Investigating and analyzing the students' learning difficulties is one of the best ways to solve the problem. This study investigates the language transfer phenomena among the Lahu students, who live in the Lancang county of Simao Prefecture. It involves a comparative analysis of the Lahu syntactic and English syntactic structure, the error analysis of Lahu students' English production in word order and a comparative study of transfer errors made by Han students and Lahu students. The data was collected from questionnaires, interviews and students' English proficiency test done by English teachers, the Han students and the Lahu students in three schools of Lancang county. The results show that the Lahu students made more errors in word order than the Han students, which means the Lahu students are suffering the negative transfer problems from their first language. It testified Robert Lado's theory that language transfer is an important characteristic of foreign language learning. Those elements that are similar to learner's native language will be simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult. (Lado,1957). Although the study has certain limitations, it suggests some possible educational implications for the English teachers teaching in minority areas and it also made a new explorative approach in this linguistic area.