On Transfer Strategy In EFL Classroom

This thesis is an empirical investigation into transfer strategy in the English as second language classroom, especially focusing on the pedagogy of the transfer strategy training for the college students. The core of the investigation concentrates on identification of the variables that influences the learner's mother tongue, and on the attempt to cultivate positive transfer in the EFL classroom.The native language plays an important role in second language learning and people cannot afford to ignore it. Therefore, the role of native language in learners' second language learning is worth careful examination. The question that L1 facilitate or inhibit the process of L2 habit formation belongs to the transfer theory. When a learner uses properties from his native or first language in his foreign or second language is generally referred to as transfer. Transfer means cases in which properties from the linguistic knowledge of the L1 are carried over into the mental knowledge learners' construct for L2. Transfer is regarded as one strategy operated within a general process of hypothesis construction, and learners construct and reconstruct hypotheses with the L1 as a source.The literature review will examine L1 transfer during second language acquisition within the context of cross-linguistic influence. An overview of the study of language transfer will be presented, followed by a discussion of the variables that operate and interact when two languages come into contact. The variables are categorized as learner-based and language-based, and each is discussed.The study consists of two phases. With the aid of the measures in psycholinguistics, the first phase presents a probe into the influences of the learner's mother tongue on the second language acquisition by means of the research into the thinking-aloud process. The thinking-aloud process provides the data, which are processed with the result that the learner's insufficient knowledge with target language is not caused by the influences from the mother tongue, but from the poor training on the semantic knowledge with the target language. The second phase focuses on the strategy training in the second language classroom by presenting the linguistic knowledge between the mother tongue and target language. That is, the differences between Chinese and English are explained by the instructor with the...