A Study On Mother Tongue Transfer In The Oral English Of Junior Middle School Students

During the study of second language acquisition (SLA), mother tongue transfer is inevitable and occupies an important position. It has been the central question in applied linguistics, language study and SLA. Mother tongue refers to the first language for a person. It plays a very important role in the acquisition of a SLA for a person, and this influence is called mother tongue transfer. Mother tongue transfer can be divided into two parts:positive transfer and negative transfer according to the advantages and the disadvantages of L1to L2. Positive transfer stands for the good influence of mother tongue when learning a second language. Negative transfer stands for the disadvantages of mother tongue during learning a second language. Negative transfer can lead to errors during the study of SLA thus to inhibit the learning of second language. Many professors and scholars have made a great number of researches about how mother tongue transfer influences SLA. And they have got many valuable results. However, among these researches, there are fewer results about how mother tongue transfer influences oral English. Also there are few results about how mother tongue transfer which influences SLA over junior middle school students’oral English learning. This is the reason why the author chooses this topic.With the development of the world, China has more and more chances to communicate with the other countries. And more people come to China from all over the world. Our country needs a large number of people who can communicate with foreigners in the future. So it gives the students in China higher requirement to learn English well. And the scholars at home and abroad pay more and more attention to the mother tongue transfer in teaching. It is believed that nowadays, the teaching of English for junior middle school students has been improved a lot. But compared with listening, reading, writing and translating, the ability of speaking is a little weaker. The reasons should be various which include the teaching methods, the environment, the attention from the others, etc. And the mother tongue transfer will also be a very vital reason among them. In this study, the author chooses60students from four middle schools in Changchun to give them oral tests. Then the author makes records and analyzes the errors in the records. The author studies the errors using quantitative method and qualitative method. The study is around the following two questions:1. How does mother tongue influence spoken English in junior middle school?2. How to use positive transfer and avoid negative transfer in order to increase the speaking ability in junior middle school?In this study, the author finds out that there are more errors caused by negative transfer than the other errors, while it includes the errors in phoneme, vocabulary, grammar and communication. As for these errors caused by negative transfer, the author puts forward some methods to deal with the problem. They are:to help the students understand language transfer correctly,make proper use of positive transfer and avoid negative transfer as possible; to let students know the significance of the study of oral English, and make students active in study; to let students focus on the input of correct pronunciation, and practice effectively; to organize contests properly; to teach students the differences between China and other western countries and help students start good habit of thinking in English. The author wants to help the junior middle students speak English better. And the author also wants to attract the attention to the English speaking ability of middle school students. However, it is worthy to be pointed out that there is still a long way to go as to how to apply the positive transfer to the oral English teaching and how to design the appropriate teaching tasks and training so that the students’oral English could be further improved.