The Influences Of Language Transfer On Chinese EFL Learners' Writing

It is a popular belief that second language acquisition (SLA) is strongly influenced by the language learners' first language (L1), which is referred to as language transfer. It has been a key issue in applied linguistics, SLA and language teaching for at least a century and it does occur in a wide variety of social contexts of second language acquisition.During the last few decades, the importance of language transfer has also been reassessed for several times. Following the related research on language transfer in the past decades, this paper focuses on the transfer phenomena that are prevailing in Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) writing by students from high schools and colleges. Three questions will be discussed and analyzed, in this paper: (1) Does Chinese EFL writers' first language influence their writing or not? (2) In how many aspects does the learners' first language influence their EFL writing? (3) To what extent does the learners' first language influence their English writing? (4) Why does first language transfer occur in the learners' writing performance in the light of linguistic structural features?The major findings of the thesis are as follows: (1) Chinese EFL writers' first language does influence their EFL writing. (2) Chinese EFL students' dependence on their mother tongue is determined by the degree of markedness of certain linguistic structures to a great extent. (3) The learners' knowledge about the cross-linguistic differences between English and Chinese plays an indispensable role as well. (4) The student writers have two languages, L1 and EFL at their disposal while composing in English. L1 is more frequently employed by most subjects to solve cognitive problems such as generating and organizing ideas while writing.Analyzing some fundamental problems in the study of language transfer makes it more obvious that language transfer has been integrated within current concepts and theoretical models to act as a helpful assistant in contemporary English teaching in China. This paper works out some suggestions such as that some contrastive studies between English and Chinese should be emphasized in the course of English teaching.