Language Transfer

Language transfer has always been a focus in the research field of second language acquisition (SLA). Years of laboring has made it universally recognized that language transfer takes the forms of facilitation, errors, avoidance and over-use. The two techniques, namely Contrastive Analysis (CA) and Error Analysis (EA), are frequently resorted to in conducting transfer studies both at home and abroad.Compared with finite sentences, including finite clauses of various types, English non-finite clauses excel in syntactic conciseness, stylistic formality and rhetorical effect. Besides, high frequency of such linguistic forms in writings features the English natives' syntactic structures, while the adoption of finite sentences as well as avoidance of non-finite clauses are typical of Chinese students' English syntactic patterns, with language fossilization occurring from the stage of "complication" to that of "simplification" (Zhao, 2003). Taking such factors into account, it is of vital importance to carry out researches to examine the acquisition of non-finite clauses by Chinese college students.The purpose of this study aims at investigating the four manifestations of transfer, namely facilitation, errors, avoidance and over-use. Owing to the limitation of the previous research designs, what was touched upon only included "avoidance" and "over-use". Motivated by the already conducted studies, this research, through an adoption of the prior instrumentation, was meant to confirm what has been observed about "avoidance" and "over-use". Meanwhile, this paper, by means of newly created instrumentation, made an attempt to fill out the blankness of the present studies by venturing to explore "facilitation" and "error" manifestations.Equipped with CA methodology, this current study singled out five forms of...