Mother Tongue And Second Language Migration Of Learning French As A Second Foreign

This paper explores the influences of native language (Chinese) transfer and second language (English) transfer on third language (French) learning.Third language acquisition is a relatively new area of study; which has gradually become one of the areas to which researchers of language acquisition pay great attention. Third language acquisition is a complex process in which learners'prior linguistic knowledge of their first and second languages may have influences on it. Do such influences really exit during a third language acquisition? If they do, how do such influences manifest themselves? And which one has greater influences, native language transfer or second language transfer? In the present thesis, an investigation on 35 undergraduates majoring in Applied English and learning French as a third language at Heilongjiang University is carried out to collect spoken French data on language errors of the subjects. Data analysis by One-way ANOVA of SPSS has suggested the conclusions that for those Chinese adults learning English as a second language, both native language transfer and second language transfer have an effect on their French learning. Such influences manifest themselves in five language aspects: phonetics, lexics, syntactics, discourses and pragmatics. Since English and French belong to the same language family—Indo-European -- while Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan, English exerts a greater influence than does Chinese in French learning.