Language Transfer In English Major’s Second Language (French) Acquisition

This paper explores the influences of native language (Chinese) transfer andsecond language (English) transfer on the third language (French) learning.Third language acquisition is a relatively new area of study in the appliedlinguistics, which has gradually become one of the areas to which researchers oflanguage acquisition pay great attention. The role of language transfer during the thirdlanguage acquisition has become a new focus and attracted much attention fromresearchers. Students learning a new language may already acquire one, two, or evenmore languages. Therefore, no study of language transfer can neglect the influence ofthe learners prior linguistic knowledge of their first and second languages on the thirdlanguage acquisition. Do such influences really exit in the acquisition of a thirdlanguage? If they do, which aspects do such influences reflect? And which language hasgreater influences, native language transfer or second language transfer? This thesis isintended to make an investigation on70undergraduates majoring in Applied Englishand learning French as a third language at Heilongjiang University. The researchcollects the spoken French data of the subjects. The errors collected are classified andthe data are analyzed with the software of One-way ANOVA of SPSS. The majorfindings are summarized as follows:(1) Both Chinese and English transfers exist in thethird language acquisition.(2) These influences can be totally explained in Phonetic,Lexical, Syntactical and Contextual transfer.(3) Since Chinese belongs to theSino-Tibetan language family, while English and French belong to the Indo-Europeanlanguage family, compared with Chinese, English transfer have more influence on thirdlanguage(French) acquisition.