A Study On The Effectiveness Of Recitation On Reducing Negative Transfer Of Chinese Syntax In English Learning

In the last decades, more and more researchers (Levenston,1971; Guiora,1983; Gass&Selinker,1992; Kellerman,1995; Odlin,2001) began to pay their attention to the relationship between the mother tongue and second language acquisition. The question of "how the mother tongue influences the second language acquisition" ranked No.1on the list of the most important issues put forward by Pica (1984) in the language teaching field. Actually, as early as1950s, behaviorists proposed that the difficulties learners may meet in the process of second language acquisition can be predicted by comparing the mother tongue and the target language systematically. Chinese and English belong to two language families, so they are different in pronunciation, lexis, syntax, and discourse. In China, as students are equipped with a complete system of mother tongue before learning English, and English has always been taught as a foreign language in English class, where English is not used as the main medium in teaching, it is inevitable that students will refer to the mother tongue in English production.In the previous studies, most researchers (Liao Fei,1998; Zhu Zhongdu,1999) have analyzed learners’ written productions, found out and classified the errors, and explored the main reasons for the phenomenon. Many researchers make a conclusion (Deng Liming,1998; Ding Yanren and Qi Yan,2001; Dong Wei and Fu Lixu,2003) that the main cause of the phenomenon of language transfer is lack of target language input, and they believe that recitation is a good way of language input. A large number of studies show that recitation plays an important role in English learning:a) Recitation can reduce students’ affective anxiety; b) Recitation can increase language input; c) Recitation can improve the monitor consciousness of negative transfer in output; d) Recitation can help students cultivate language sense. However, there are few empirical researches on the effect of recitation on decreasing the errors caused by the negative transfer of mother tongue.Based on the Contrastive Analysis theory, the research is conducted to explore the extent of influence of Chinese on the following six syntactic structures:"there be" structure, choice of subject, negation, use of conjunction, passive voice, and S-V concord. The subjects of the research are two classes from Art Department, Zhixing College of Hubei University, one class as experiment group and the other as control group. Students in EG are asked to recite some English materials in the experiment which lasts for12weeks while the students in CG need not do the recitation. The results of the pretest, interview and posttest are analyzed to inspect the effectiveness of recitation in avoiding the syntactic transfer of Chinese. The result shows that recitation is effective in decreasing the errors in negation and use of conjunction while it is not effective in other types of errors. It can be concluded that recitation can avoid the phenomenon of negative transfer of Chinese in students’production to some degree. Recitation, as a traditional language learning method, should be put more emphasis by teachers and students.