Study On The Roles Of Chinese And English During French Acquisition

Odlin (2001) points out in his famous "Language Transfer: Cross Linguistic Influence in Language Learning", "Individuals learning a new language may already know two, three, or even more languages. Therefore, no study of transfer can neglect the importance of trilingual and other multilingual situations." However, so far almost all studies and discussions have focused on the language transfer in bilingual situations and the number of the researches on the language transfer during the third language acquisition is small. Therefore, the researcher attempts to study the roles of Chinese and English during French acquisition by analyzing the errors in the Chinese English majors' French writing.What are the most common errors in Chinese English majors' French writings? What are the distributions of each type of errors in these writings? What are the possible causes of these errors? And what can we get for the second foreign language—French teaching from the analysis and discussion of the errors?In order to answer these questions, the researcher conducts an empirical study. Seventy nine English majors, who take French as their second foreign language, participate in the research voluntarily. Of these students, nine are from Dalian University of Technology and seventy from Dalian University of Foreign Languages. They are juniors, seniors and the first year postgraduates respectively, and all of them have learned French for at least two years. Each subject is given 30 minutes to write a composition named "Un Livre" of 90 words. Then another 10 minutes are given to them to correct their compositions by themselves. These compositions are then scored by two French teachers. And all the errors appearing in the compositions are marked out. And then interviews are carried out because sometimes it is difficult to distinguish interlingual errors from intralingual errors and to judge which errors can be attributed to Chinese negative transfer and which ones are committed owing to English negative transfer.Through analyzing and discussing deeply and thoroughly the lexical and syntactic errors in the Chinese English majors' French compositions, together with the interviews, the researcher draw the findings as follows.Language transfers during French, Chinese and English exist at only two levels—lexical and syntactic level. And the number of the errors at syntactic level is larger than that of lexical level. Both Chinese and English negative transfers exist at lexical and syntactic levels. And they even appear in the same categories. In addition, the number of Chinese negative transfer is a little bit larger than that of English negative transfer. Chinese negative transfer usually functions because of differences between Chinese and French, whereas English negative transfer happens on the basis of similarities between English and French. At last, it is necessary to apply contrastive analysis and error analysis to the second foreign language teaching in China.It is hopefully that the dissertation can practically help the students improve their French learning, and to assistant the teachers to improve their teaching. Besides, theoretically, it may make contributions to enrich the theory of language transfer in a certain degree.