On Interference In Second Language Learning

Interference is either the influence of what language learners have acquired in one context on the learning in another context or the influence of the knowledge and experience from learner's native language on foreign language learning. In the second language learning two aspects lead to the occurrence of the interference, i.e the explicit and implicit interference. Interference occurs in the course of the contact of the two languages and the reasons resulting in the interference are various, which may be from the perspective of language itself or from different cultural background and religious beliefs.English and Chinese belong to different language families. The main reasons resulting in the interference are due to the differences between the two different language systems, different nations and different cultures. However, the differences can be revealed by comparison and contrast. Phonetically, there are either some similar phonemes or different phonemes in English and Chinese. English belongs to an intonation language and its prosody is mainly made up of metric foot and rhythm. The metric foot meter is composed of unstressed and stressed syllables, but Chinese is a tone language and it has its own prosody. Usually, its prosody is composed of the flat and oblique. In the aspect of characters, English words are either orthographic or ideographic, the letters can reflect the pronunciation, but Chinese characters are pictograph, each being composed of strokes. Chinese characters mainly reflect their contents and meanings; therefore, they are also called ideograph or ideogram. Chinese characters are the combinations of all kinds of strokes in a certain order. In lexis, the vocabulary is larger in English than in Chinese. The lexical system of English is open, compared with Chinese, the number of Chinese vocabulary is fixed. In grammar, English is a synthetic language with the rich inflectional morphological changes. The grammatical relationship within a sentence can be expressed by means of morphological signs, but Chinese is an isolated language, without any inflectional morphological change, the relationship within the sentence is expressed by the implied logical meaning.Interference is covered and permeable, which can be classified into the following types as far as its forms are concerned: phonetic transfer; lexical transfer; grammatical transfer; rhetorical transfer and paralinguistic transfer. It has to be pointed out that there are no identical interferences in different levels, but they are permeable and various.Pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication often occur due to different cultural background, thinking habits, reasoning modes of the participants, which is the consequence produced by the interference, i.e. the communicative failures led by the misinterpreting the pragmatic force of a certain piece of information. Some failures result from the fact that what the speaker says does not agree to the linguistic habits of the native speaker's, called linguistic pragmatic failure, and some failures are caused by the phenomenon that what the speaker says is not suitable to the native speaker's cultural background, social rituals and customs, called social-pragmatic failures. The purpose of studying interference is to know it and try to overcome it to avoid pragmatic failures, making the communication smooth. Interference is permeable and various, but it may be decreased or overcome by improving learners' linguistic competence, communicative competence and cultural quality.