Mother Tongue Transfer And Oral Speech Errors

Mother tongue transfer is an inevitable phenomenon during the process of second language acquisition. Mother tongue transfer can be divided into positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer facilitates language understanding and acquisition while negative transfer proves to be an obstacle to language acquisition leading to language errors. Based on the theories concerning language transfer, the author carried out a research on the speech errors of the 60 samples selected from the corpus SECCL attempting to find out the relationship between mother tongue transfer and speech errors. The whole study tries to answer the following two questions: 1. Where do errors that arise from negative transfer occur? 2.What causes the transfer? The results of the study show that mother tongue transfer can occur both linguistically and culturally. The speech errors caused by mother tongue transfer can be roughly divided into four aspects: phonology, lexis, syntax and pragmatics. The phonetic transfer is omitted in this thesis due to the lack of sophisticated equipments for analysis. According to the results of the analysis of the 60 samples from the corpus, the main reason of the speech errors is the distinctions between the languages and cultures of English and Chinese. The whole thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One describes the purpose and significance of the present study and states the framework of the thesis. Chapter Two reviews the relevant theories and findings in the field of linguistics which are mainly Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage.Chapter Three concerns the methodology of the research including corpus source, data collecting and the procedure of the analysis.Chapter Four analyzes the mother tongue transfer from the perspectives of lexis, syntax and pragmatics in detail. This chapter is also the core part of the thesis.Based on the results discussed in Chapter Four, some pedagogical implications are given in Chapter Five concerning oral English learning and teaching.The last chapter concludes the whole thesis and points out the limitations of the present study.