The Negative Transfer Of The Mother Tongue In English Vocabulary Acquisition

According to the language transfer theory, it is assumed that the learner's mother tongue will positively or negatively affect his learning a foreign language in second language acquisition (SLA): where there are differences between his mother tongue (MT) and target language (TL), the learner's mother tongue knowledge will interfere with the target language, and where the mother tongue and target language are similar, the native language will actively aid foreign language learning, that is, in the case of similarities between the native language and target language, the transfer functions positively, while in the case of differences, it functions negatively.Language transfer in acquiring a foreign language is seemingly inevitable. Since the differences between the learners' MT and TL will interfere with the target language learning, this paper is an attempt to describe the differences between English and Chinese vocabulary system and to analyze the learner's transfer errors at lexical level, with the purpose of showing how the Chinese learners of English are negatively influenced by their mother tongue knowledge in learning English vocabulary, and putting forward some pedagogic implications. The study is conducted on the basis of the theories of contrastive analysis, error analysis, and transfer analysis.