An Empirical Study Of Learning Strategy Training On Language Transfer

Language transfer refers to an unconscious and uncontrolled mental process, inwhich the first language will greatly impact on the second language. According to thetransfer results, we can divide it into positive transfer and negative transfer, and theformer one will facilitate the learning efficiency while the latter one will impede thelearning process. Language transfer as an important factor in second languageacquisition has been studied for many years, and the question how tofacilitate/strengthen the positive transfer and reduce/avoid the negative transfer insecond language acquisition has always been the core issue for the researchers fromhome and abroad. Linguistics and researchers have never stopped their attempts toenrich the theoretical and empirical developments on language transfer. However, mostof the previous studies about language transfer focus on the theory-analysis and uncoverthe inner mechanism of language transfer from the cognitive perspective, such aspsychotypoloy, prototypicality and markedness. But the empirical researches aboutlanguage transfer are seldom.Learning strategy, in Anderson’s words, can be regarded as cognitive skills and canfacilitate learning process and affect the learner’s motivational state, or the way inwhich the learner selects, acquires, organizes or integrates the new knowledge.O’Malley and Chamot thought learning strategy may include any of the followingaspects: focusing on selected aspects of new information, analyzing and monitoringinformation during the encoding process, evaluating the learning when it is completed,or assuring oneself that the learning will be successful as a way to allay anxiety. Thus,strategies may have an affective or conceptual basis, and may influence the learning ofsimple tasks and complex tasks, and which has also been used for solving kinds ofproblems in English learning. Both learning strategies and language transfer are theessential components of second language acquisition, and we can suppose that there aresome connection between learning strategies and language transfer, or learningstrategies as cognitive skills may have some influence on language transfer.This thesis will concentrate on the empirical research (research-analysis,questionnaire, interviews and conversations). The participants are92junior Englishmajors from Polytechnic Institute of Jiangxi Science&Technology Normal University,and based on O’malley and Chamot’s theory, this paper will analyze the transferphenomenon from the language levels of punctuation, lexical, morphology, syntax, unity, coherence and pragmatic, which was classified by James. Through thecomparison results between the pre-training test and the post-training test, we prove thisassumption that learning strategy training will facilitate/strengthen the positive transferand reduce/avoid the negative transfer in English learning, and based on which, theauthor will give some practical and effective suggestions to facilitate/strengthen positivetransfer and reduce/avoid negative transfer in English learning.