A Study On The Application Of Transfer Theory To The Teaching Of Oral Business English

With the accelerating development of economic globalization and the enhancing economic corporation between China and other countries, it is becoming more and more important to cultivate students'ability of oral business English. However, its current teaching is not so satisfying. A better way to solve the problem is the application of language transfer theory. Language transfer theory refers to the influences of the one learning experience upon another kind of learning. In terms of theory, it can explain how the previous learning experiences do the influences on the latter study. In terms of practices, grasping the law of language transfer can reduce the specific learning and enhance the efficiency of teaching work. There are three ways to categorize language transfer theory: positive transfer and negative transfer; interlanguage transfer and intralanguage transfer; transfer in communication and transfer in learning.The achievements in the area in China focused on the grammar or reading of the English learning and few researches has been done on the oral English, let alone empirical study of oral business English. Based on this situation, the thesis is written to study how to apply language transfer theory to the college oral business English, to explore the teaching approaches of improving positive transfer and preventing negative one and finally to reach the goal of helping the college student to improve the oral English learning ability.The author did an experiment lasted for four months from September to December of 2010 in the two classes of sixty students of the Wuhan University of science and technology. Three answers are required in this experiment:1) Whether language transfer theory can be used in the classes of oral business English?2) If transfer theory is utilized, can the oral English classes be taught in a better way?3) How to apply transfer theory to the learning of oral business English?The research is based on the transfer theory with the two test scores and two questionnaires as the tools. The tests: two classes in Wuhan University of Science and Technology were divided into experimental class and control class, with respectively teaching approaches of language transfer theory and traditional one. Through the comparison and analysis with the SPSS and questionnaires collected before and after the experiment, conclusion was drawn: the oral English ability of the experimental group applied with transfer theory is higher than that of control group with traditional teaching approach. Therefore, as researchers in the area, we should apply a variety of transfer teaching methods to English teaching class, in order to improve the quality of teaching and make students'learning more efficient. What the author hope is that this research can provide the experience and methods for the further transfer application study.