A Study On The Negative Transfer Of Previously Acquired Languages In Target Language Collocation

Language transfer has long been an important topic in SLA research.Through years of intense discussion on language transfer,researchers pay more attention to instances of transfer of previously acquired languages in target language learning.As an important component of vocabulary knowledge,collocational knowledge has received more attention.This study aimes to probe into the features of negative transfer of previously acquired languages in target language collocation of the low proficiency level Chinese learners of English as the second language and Chinese learners of French as the third language.The present study,which employs BROWN and LOB as two reference native speaker corpora,is based on the senior high school learner corpus ST2 in the Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC) and a self-built French corpus of the English majors who learn French as their second foreign language in Dalian Maritime University.The study focuses on the negative transfer of previously acquired languages in target language collocation and makes an in-depth discussion from six aspects of collocational errors:CC1('noun+noun' errors),CC2('noun+verb' errors),CC3 ('verb+noun' errors),CC4('adjective+noun' errors),CC5('verb+adverb' errors) and CC6('adverb+adjective' errors).The findings reveal that the number of errors is unevenly distributed in the six types.Chinese negative transfer in the two learner corpora congregates in CC3.Chinese learners have special difficulty in the 'verb+ noun' collocations.The CC3 errors,resulting from Chinese transfer in English,Chinese transfer in French and English transfer in French,account for 43.92%,25%and 71.42% respectively.The most important factor causing negative transfer of previously acquired languages was discussed from the perspective of psychotypology.Finally,the research findings are summarized,and then pedagogical implications, limitations of the present study and suggestions for further study are discussed.