Research On Reverse Negative Transfer Made From Japanese As L3to English As L2

Traditionally, L1competence of individual speakers has been treated as stable. Once the speaker’s language system has matured, his or her linguistic competence is no longer subject to change. Recent researches on SLA and bilingualism have demonstrated that L1competence is a dynamic phenomenon. Of particular importance is the fact that L2effects on L1are sometimes visible even among learners and speakers of a foreign language who are still residing in their native language context. Similarly, trilingual learners’ second language is also a dynamic phenomenon which would be subject to third language influence.Compared with second language, third language acquisition is a relatively new area in applied linguistics and little by little has gained researchers’ attention in recent researches. Third language acquisition (TLA) researches have experienced important developments in recent years (Cenoz&Genesee1998; Cenoz&Jessner2000; Hufeisen&Lindeman1998; Cenoz et al.2000,2001). The interest in third language acquisition has sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic foundations. From a sociolinguistic perspective, the widespread of English in the world, the increasing mobility of the world and the recognition of minority languages have resulted in social and educational situations in which learning more than two languages is not exceptional. Specifically speaking, students learning a new language may already acquire one, two, or even more languages. Therefore, no study of cross-linguistic influence could neglect the role of third language. The research of this thesis focuses on negative side of reverse transfer made from Japanese to English and hopes to contribute a little to the under-explored areas in cross-linguistic influence.To Japanese majors, does reverse negative transfer really exist in the acquisition of English? If it does exist, in what aspects will such influence be reflected? And among these aspects which one has a greater influence than others in English acquisition? What can we learn in teaching and learning second language as well as third language? In this thesis, the author plans to have an investigation on50undergraduate students in Inner Mongolia University whose majors are Japanese. The research instrument including questionnaire, sentence translating as well as reading an article. In this research, data will be collected from the subjects and errors being gathered will undergo classification. After that analysis of the data will be done. The major findings are summarized as follows:(1) Reverse negative transfer made from Japanese as L3to English as L2does exist.(2) In this research, these reverse negative transfer is mainly demonstrated in phonetical, lexical and syntactical aspects.(3) According to the questionnaire, most students held the view that syntactical transfer has a greater influence than phonetical and lexical part, which is quite out of author’s expectation.