A Study On The Crosslinguistic Influence Between Proficient Japanese Learners’chinese (L1), English (L2) And Japanese (L3)Lexical Errors

As the development of politics, economics and culture is closer and closer, most people at present are dissatisfied with mastering of two languages.They try to learn an L3,L4or Lx as needed. Some linguists, especially those who study on language acquisition, begin to pay great attention to this field.The study of TLA started in late19th century. However, research on TLA is still in its infancy phase because there are only a few relevant researchers both abroad and in China.Most researchers study TLA in the European context, and they have noticed the great influence of L2on lexical learning of L3,for example Cenoz, Jorda, Rinbom etc.. Nowadays, although many students in China are Chinese-English-Japanese learners,the correspondent studies are relevantly rare. In order to supply the trilingual learners and the related teachers with a more effective studying and teaching of L3,the author in this paper tried to empirically study the relation of crosslinguistic influence among Chinese-English-Japanese and the differences of Japanese lexical errors by proficient Japanese students with different L2proficiency levels.The subjects,23English majors and27Japanese majors from a northeastern university of China, took part in the experiment. The subjects’native language was Chinese and they had a formal education of English (L2) and Japanese (L3)in the school. The experiment applied qualitative and quantitative analysis with a questionnaire, a vocabulary test and interview as instruments.The findings showed that the subjects prefer to take more CLI of Japanese lexical errors from L1-Chinese than L2-English and subjects of high English (L2)proficiency level took more CLI than the low ones especially in semantic errors and errors concerning word-class conversion.This was because the proficiency level in L2-English was different and the language distance between Chinese and Japanese was closer than that between Chinese and English.The findings are of great significance to studies of TLA. On the one hand, this study enriches and develops studies of TLA in the Chinese educational context, especially in differences of Japanese lexical errors by the proficient Japanese students with different L2proficiency levels.On the other hand, the study of the lexical crosslinguistic influence among Chinese, English and Japanese enriches and developes the theory of transfer. At the same time, the findings can be provided as a reference for Japanese (L3)teachers on teaching strategies.The teachers can adopt different teaching strategies with students of different English proficiency levels.The students can probe into the L3vocabulary learning mechanism according to their English levels and promote their L2and L3learning.The findings also provide a reference to Japanese (L3)textbook revisers in China with rational teaching materials, so the teachers can teach the students according to their aptitude.