An Analysis Of The Phenomena Of Negative Syntactic Transfer In The Process Of Uyghur College Students' Learning English

Language transfer has been a core issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and language teaching for at least a century (Odlin, 2001: ix). Studies on language transfer in the earlier days mainly involved bilinguals, and only in recent decades, there have been interests in the exploration of cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition (TLA). Studies on syntactic transfer in TLA generally include those languages from the same language system, and fewer studies have involved languages of different phyla, such as Uygur, Chinese and English, but the study on transfer regarding these three languages is very necessary. On the one hand, a wider variety of languages need to be researched to get a broader understanding of language transfer theory and phenomena. On the other, hopefully, the research in this field will enlighten the instructors teaching English to minority students, and also it will provide useful materials for researchers and instructors.Based on the framework of contrastive analysis, error analysis and transfer analysis (proposed by James, C. 2001), the present study explores the phenomena of negative syntactic transfer from the previously acquired languages (Uyghur as L1 and Chinese as L2) to a target language (English as L3) during the process of Uygur college students'learning English. The study focused on five syntactic structures: (a) the use of preposition plus a noun functioning as adverb of place in a sentence, (b) the placement of adverbs, such as very/very much/together/always, etc. (c) the use of copula Be as a linking and an auxiliary verb, (d) there be structure for expressing the existential or presentative function, (e) the use of relative clauses. The data was obtained from 90 Uyghur college students at two English proficiency levels: 56 sophomores of non-English major at lower-intermediate level (Group 1), and 34 juniors of English major at upper-intermediate level (Group 2). The research procedure was: (1) error taxonomy was established by analyzing the interlanguage error types in the writing task assigned to the 56 sophomores of non-English major in Group 1, and the main error types were selected for further study; (2) a questionnaire was used to learn about language backgrounds of Group 1 and Group 2; (3) Chinese and English proficiency tests were given to Group 1 and Group 2 respectively so as to confirm their language proficiency levels; (4) a written exam including two elicitation tasks (sentence translation and grammaticality judgment tasks) focusing on the five English syntactic structures was taken by Group 1 and Group 2, two questions were also contained in the translation task to learn about the participants'tendency to think in another language before writing English; (5) individual interviews (5 participants were selected randomly from each group for the interview) were conducted after the written exam so as to learn about some of the underlying reasons of the syntactic transfer phenomena. In general, the present study has yielded confirmative findings of negative syntactic transfer. Despite their differences in English proficiency levels, participants from both Group 1 and Group 2, to a certain extent, tended to call on Chinese in the process of English production, whereas the mother tongue influence was only found in the omission of preposition. The omnipresent syntactic errors made by the lower-intermediate group showed that this group depended much more on Chinese. Although the upper-intermediate group had fewer errors in the use of adverbs and prepositions, the errors they made in there be structure and relative clauses were quite similar to those made by the lower-intermediate group, showing that even the participants at a higher English level were not immune to the influence of Chinese in the process of English production. Besides, the higher occurrence of errors in the use of copula Be in both groups also suggested that participants in this study had big problems with this verb, and these errors might have resulted from the confusion of copula Be as a linking verb with its use as an auxiliary verb. Some errors might have been caused by the underdeveloped knowledge about some TL forms.The thesis includes 7 chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the research background, aims and the significance of the present study. Chapter 2 is a historical review of theories of language transfer and some relevant empirical studies both abroad and at home. The studies on syntactic transfer and the factors affecting language transfer in TLA are mainly discussed. Chapter 3 is about the theoretical foundations, and the contrastive analysis, error analysis and transfer analysis (proposed by James, C., 2001) are introduced. Chapter 4 introduces the methodology, which includes the research questions, the participants, the instruments, and the procedures of data collection and analysis. Chapter 5 is a contrastive study of the five syntactic structures (preposition, adverbs, copula Be, there be structure and relative clauses) in three languages: English, Chinese and Uygur. Chapter 6 is the results and findings, including results of the questionnaire and language proficiency tests, results of reported tendency to think in another language before writing in English, results of error analysis and transfer analysis of all the syntactic errors, and also the results of individual interview. Chapter 7 is the discussion and conclusions, including some implications and limitations of the present study.