A Study Of Syntactic Transfer In English Learning Of Chinese Students

Language transfer has long been a central issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition (SLA) and language teaching. In the last few decades, its importance in second language acquisition has been reassessed several times. Nowadays, it has been seen as a mental process that works and interacts with a host of other factors, such as linguistic universals, social factors, and individual differences, in the process of second language learning.Based on the theoretical and empirical research findings in transfer literature, this thesis makes a study on syntactic transfer in English learning of Chinese learners. The research focuses on discussing two questions: (1) To what extent is the English written production of Chinese college students influenced by the structures of their L1, Chinese; (2) Are there any differences or similarities concerning syntactic transfer between students from different proficiency levels.The participants are 215 college students who are randomly selected from the 2004-grade non-English majors studying at Jilin University. Three data elicitation techniques are employed in this study. They are individual interview, translation test, and grammaticality judgment test. Data analyses focus on discussing five error types, namely, incorrect use of negation, incorrect placement of adverbs, failure to use relative clauses, confusion in tag questions and failure to use conjunctions.The results of this study show that many Chinese ESL learners tend to think in Chinese first before they write in English and that the surface structures of many of the interlanguage strings produced by the participants present influence from Chinese sentence structures. The extent of syntactic transfer is particularly large for complex target structures and among learners of a lower proficiency level, though higher proficiency level learners may also have relied on the syntactic structures of their L1, Chinese.The written production of these Chinese ESL learners also indicates that both interlingual and intralingual errors are present in their interlanguage. Avoidance, a common strategy used by many subjects in dealing with relative clauses is also seen as evidence of influence from Chinese.Several implications can be drawn from this study. First, the research demonstrates that syntactic transfer does play a role in shaping ESL learners'interlanguage and that a sole universal explanation for syntax learning is not objective. Second, the role of contrastive analysis should be reassessed. Those views that totally dismiss its role in second language acquisition are not warranted, since it can be used in conjunction with error analysis in descriptive research, as it does in this study. Third, the discrepancy between what students report in the individual interview and their written production provides some implications for language teaching. Although some students report that they have reflected on what they have learned in grammar lessons, they still make errors concerning the chosen structural patterns. Therefore, several suggestions are provided by the researcher to improve grammar teaching. One way is to foster the students'consciousness about language distance. Another way of facilitating grammar teaching is to explain the similarities and differences between syntactic characteristics of the native language and the target language.