A Study Of Grammatical Transfer In Adult English Learning

Language transfer is a fundamental issue in second language acquisition studies,although it"has long been a controversial topic in applied linguistics, second languageacquisition, and language teaching"(Odlin, 1989). Transfer manifests itself at variouslinguistic levels. This paper aims to explore the grammatical transfer phenomenon in adultEnglish learning by means of several instruments: classroom observation, questionnaire, C-Etranslation and sentence rearrangement tasks, in order to draw some implications for adultEnglish teaching.Chapter 1 introduces the definition and manifestations of language transfer, and offers acomprehensive overview on the historical development of language transfer studies in SLAdomain, in order to help us have a holistic and clear understanding of the role of L1 insecond/foreign language learning. Meanwhile, the new explanations for language transfer aredepicted from the perspective of markedness as a constraint on it. And the general assumptionof the study is proposed at the end: In Chinese adult English learning, the unmarked Chinesegrammatical features will tend to transfer while the marked Chinese grammatical features willnot.Therefore, a contrastive study of both English and Chinese grammatical features iscarried out from the perspective of markedness in Chapter 2. Based on the markednessdifferences between English and Chinese in terms of morphology and syntax, the generalassumption of the study is specified into six detailed ones, so as to further explore therelationship between the markedness of these specific grammatical features and languagetransfer.The data of this study were collected among the Chinese adult intermediate EFLlearnersin a vocational and technical college. Based on the data obtained from these adult EFLlearners, through classifying the grammatical errors into different types and analyzing theresults of the C-E translation and sentence rearrangement tasks, this study presentsconfirmative evidence in support of the existence of negative grammatical transfer fromChinese to English as well as the predictability that markedness exerts on grammaticaltransfer. Meanwhile, some implications for adult English teaching are drawn on the basis ofthe results of this study, with the hope of promoting the efficiency of both adult English teaching and learning.