Experimental Study On Positive Transferability In English Vocabulary Learning Of Chinese College Students

Language transfer has always been a central issue in second language acquisition and language teaching.Within the last half century,its importance in second language learning has been reassessed several times.At present,however,a balanced perspective has emerged in which the role of transfer is acknowledged and in which transfer is seen to interact with a host of other factors in ways not yet fully understood.Transfer is the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously acquired.Positive transfer is a transfer which makes learning easier,and may occur when both the native language and the target language have the same form.In traditional accounts of language transfer,the research focused on the errors that learners produced.Current discussions of transfer emphasize the necessity of considering the multiple ways in which L1 influence can exert itself.Transfer scholars, therefore,also look for evidences of positive transfer.Linguists have investigated many areas in L2 to illustrate how transfer can have a facilitative effect.In one area, vocabulary,for example,there are investigations revealing the great importance of positive transfer.Then,does positive transfer play a role in English vocabulary acquisition for Chinese since English and Chinese are not cognate? This is the main purpose of the study in the thesis.This thesis consists of introduction,four chapters,and conclusion.Chapter one makes a historical review on transfer studies and the constraints on language transfer. This chapter includes Behaviorism and early thinking on language transfer, interlanguage theory,linguistic universals and cognitive and psychological linguistics. Among the six constraints,the three of which,that is,markedness,prototypicality and language distance and psychotypology,are analyzed because they are assumed to have more effects on the later experiment of this paper.Chapter two introduces the model experiment of this paper's experiment,and discusses how to design the test materials aiming at discovering positive transfer in English vocabulary learning by different Chinese learners.After the discussion,an experiment on the positive transferability in vocabulary learning of Chinese college students is conducted on the purpose to predict positive transferability of vocabulary-semantic.Through data analysis, chapter three gives a discussion on the role of positive transfer in terms of the findings as follows:1.If the native speaker's semantic space contains different but related senses of a word,there will exist the probability assigned by learners to each of these senses which could be represented in English by the primary counterpart.At least for the seven common senses of "bad",the positive transferability is likely to occur when Chinese learners learn English,and some other metaphoric senses may produce less positive transfer or their negative transferability are greater.2.Transferability can indeed be established entirely on the basis of L1-specific characteristics which are independent of the L2;that is,learners' perceptions regarding the translatability of L1 items is not influenced by their experience with the L2,though L2 knowledge effects cannot be accordingly ruled out.3.The role of the L2 in the transferability of a structure will be determined by the learner's perception of its relatedness to the L1 in the given structure domain(his "psychotypology").An L2 perceived as "close" will boost the likelihood of transfer, an L2 perceived as "distant" will depress it,but the transferability of structure remains constant.4.We are sure that hints can be used to improve the transferability of metaphoric senses while it is hard to produce the transferability of common senses close to "prototypical sense" of a word,and that any improper hints can probably play a negative role in the learning of the common senses of a word.Chapter four considers some of the implications that the research may have for teaching.Though owing to the complexity of the issue and my limited knowledge,the study is far from being exhaustive and many things still await further investigation, the study still has its significance for both learners and language teachers on the objective understand of the role of L1,good balance between the similarities and differences of L1 and L2,and attempts to improve learners' consciousness of the similarities.