A Study Of Syntactic Transfer In English Learning Of Chinese College English Majors

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 of 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 30 proficient students and 30 less proficient students from 60 grade-two English majors in Dezhou College. Three data elicitation techniques are employed in this study. They are translation test, individual interview, and writing test. Data analyses focus on discussing failure to use relative clauses.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 lower proficiency level, though higher proficiency level learners may also have relied on the syntactic structures of their Chinese L1.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. Firstly, foreign language teachers are required to raise the consciousness of cross-linguistic influence and to make their students aware of the differences and similarities of syntactic structures between native language and target language in their writing. At the same time, teachers need to find some methods to help the students notice the different thought patterns and use English in the English way. Secondly, in English teaching, teachers should provide students with as much comprehensible input and output as possible so as to reduce fundamentally students' syntactic transfer. Thirdly, students should learn to think in English in second language acquisition, and finally, second language acquisition researchers should establish an empirically based taxonomy of the typical interlingual errors.