Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Foreign Language Learing

The term "transfer" is first defined by behaviorists to refer to the process of automatic, uncontrolled and subconscious use of past learned behavior in the attempt to produce new responses. According to behaviorists, the main impediment to learning was interference from the prior knowledge. Psycholinguists use the term to refer to the influence imposed by a learner's possessed linguistic knowledge and skill upon the subsequent learning of new linguistic knowledge or skill. Generally speaking, there are two types of transfer, that is, positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer, as its name suggests, plays a positive role of facilitating the process of target language acquisition. Negative transfer, on the contrary, impedes it. Negative pragmatic transfer from learners' any acquired language to the target language has been repeatedly evidenced in cross-linguistic comparisons of speech acts.College students of Taiyuan University of Technology are the subjects in the study of this thesis. Based on the learners' performance in their exercises in class and after class, problems of negative transfer are thoroughly studied and analyzed. Through a lot of observations, the study of the problems are carried out. The examples of the analysis come from the author's observation of the students' performance in the class-discussion and their homework assignment.Then based on the convincingly enough examples from the study, the author of this thesis analyzes negative transfer at the levels of substance, lexis, syntax, paragraphs, and the way of thinking. It is evidenced from the study that negative...