Language Transfer And College English Teaching

The research of language transfer has undergone more than one century, which has fully testified the existence of it in language. This thesis aims at studying this very important subject of SLA. Empirical research around it has been carried out with main purpose of providing specific teaching practice examples for the teachers engaged in SLT and drawing their enough attention to this phenomenon. As a learner of SL and a teacher engaged in SLT as well, I constantly feel confused about the frequent errors and the universal errors made in the output of SL. Thus, the research related to speech sound and writing carried out after elaborate arrangements. I tried to testify two assumptions: 1. The phenomenon of Language Transfer exists in three levels (phonetic, lexical and syntactic) which are composed of the main framework of a sentence. And the language transfer is one of the main sources among all the sources of writing errors. 2. The students usually resort to avoidance strategy in order not to make errors in writing , for example , the use of relative clause will not be as many as the use by English native speakers. During the research, a software called COOLEDIT was used to record speech sounds materials of 100 students. Totally 40 compositions sampled to be the material being analyzed in this research. Findings through the research have proved the two assumptions; language transfer exists in the three levels mentioned above. The analysis by SPSS and Excel proved the correlation is positive. The correlation value (r) is .808~*. Therefore, the conclusion that language transfer is one of the main sources of errors in writings can be acquired. There are 17 relative clauses found in 40 writings and no relative clause found in 28 writings which is 70% of the total. Therefore, we can conclude that Chinese students adopt the avoidance strategy in second language writing. The most important thing is to give the relative strategies to avoid the negative language transfer. So the author selected several strategies with their feasibility, practicality, manipulation and pertinence. Contrastive strategy and error analysis strategy are still the essential ones in dealing with language transfer.