A Study Of Mother Tongue Transfer In Non-english Majors' Spoken English

Spoken language is one of the most direct and efficient communication means. As nowadays college English teaching reform has attracted considerable attention in China, English language researchers and English teachers have also attached importance to the teaching of spoken English. However, to people's disappointment, most Chinese college students especially non-English majors can't speak fluent and standard English after their graduation from universities. The present study not only helps us to have a better understanding of mother tongue transfer in spoken English, but also mentions some countermeasures aiming to reduce the negative transfer from our mother tongue, hoping that transfer errors can be diminished to some degrees in English speaking and also has implications for college spoken English learning and teaching.Mother tongue transfer is an inevitable phenomenon in the field of Second Language Acquisition. Language transfer comprises positive transfer which facilitates language learning and negative transfer which hinders language learning and leads to errors. In recent years, the researchers home and abroad have done great work on mother tongue transfer in college English teaching from various perspectives. Whereas few have done about non-English majors'spoken English. The theories related to mother tongue transfer, including contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage are illustrated firstly. Then the text errors are analyzed in linguistic categories and 100 sophomores of non-English majors participate in this study. They are asked to have an oral task and answer a questionnaire. An interview is also conducted. The results of the study show that mother tongue transfer plays an important role in determining to what extent a second language learner can attain in speaking competence. Mother tongue transfer can occur both linguistically and culturally. In this thesis, the common errors that due to the negative transfer of native language in the process of speaking in English are collected and classified into the lexical level, the syntactic level and the pragmatic level, hoping to help the Chinese students to know their errors and the causes of their errors more consciously. What's more, it's found that male students rely more on mother tongue than female students. For the most non-English majors, the main problem in spoken English is to express ideas in English for the lack of vocabulary.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the whole thesis describing the background, significance and purpose of the study. Chapter 2 is a literature review on relevant theories and researches concerning transfer, laying a solid theoretical foundation for the research. Chapter 3 is a research design on negative transfer, in which the research questions, subjects, procedures and data collection are stated. Chapter 4 reports the results gained from the study and analysis, the occurrence of mother tongue, the influence of spoken English proficiency on Chinese and the effects of Chinese use in spoken English. Then in Chapter 5 the author states the pedagogical implications of the research for spoken English learning and teaching. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes the whole thesis and points out the limitations.