An Empirical Study On Conceptual Transfer Of Space In The Chinese English Learners’ Narratives

Conceptual transfer denotes the observation that second/foreign language learnersand bilinguals from different language backgrounds often refer to the same objects andevents in different conceptual ways and in ways that are specific to their languagebackgrounds. Jarvis&Pavlenko classified conceptual transfer into eight domains,including object, emotion, personhood, gender, number, time, space and motion. Spatialconcepts are taken as the object of the present study. Spatial concepts, one of the mostbasic concepts represent how people perceive, classify and organize various spatialrelations between objects and define the relationship between people and objects, as wellas the relationships of objects. Spatial concepts help people understand more precisedirections, ask more detailed questions, and express more accurate ideas to others.Therefore, spatial concepts are of great value to increase learners’ native-like fluency.However, Chinese English learners (CEL) show great weakness in the appropriate use ofspatial concepts. This study explored the phenomenon of conceptual transfer in space ofthe CEL narratives, aiming to answer two questions:(1) does the conceptual transfer ofspace happen to CEL in their second language’s output?(2) If it is, in which aspects doesit exist? This study adopted the silent short video method to collect data, in which thesubjects were asked to narrate the content of the movie. Then BFSU Qualitative Coder andCIA method were used to code and analyze the data. The subjects include30Englishnative speakers (ENS),30CEL learners, and30Chinese native speakers (CNS).The result reveals:(1) Conceptual transfer in space does happen in CEL’s languageoutput.(2) The transfer mainly distributed in the aspects of [FOR-INT], that is, in theproduction of second language output, CEL seldom use the objects in question as the pointof departure. In the aspects of [ICS], learners over-generalized certain spatial prepositionsin the process of second language production. So in the SLA, both teachers and studentsshould heighten spatial concepts awareness; learners should increase spatial conceptsinput and explore the deep meaning of the spatial prepositions. At the same time, teachersshould encourage the learners to explore the rules of language with the method ofinduction and analogy to reduce the occurrence of over-generalization.