Influence Of Language Transfer On College Students In English Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary teaching constitutes a crucial part in college English teaching, andeffective teaching of vocabulary lay a solid foundation for language acquisition.Researches show that native language transfer is one of the factors which affect thesecond language acquisition, which can’t be ignored.The theory of native language transfer originates from1940s---the early stage ofbehaviorism. Rod Ellis holds that transfer is the process of using knowledge of the firstlanguage in learning a second language. The native language transfer can be positiveand negative. For years, a lot of researches on native language transfer have been done.However, very little has been done on the positive transfer in vocabulary learning in thisarea. Cross-linguistic similarities are neglected for a long time. Many linguistics arguesthese similarities can promote the acquisition of languages with the same features.Therefore, when much emphasis is put on the negative transfer of Chinese, it is alsonecessary to pay enough attention to the researches on the similarities between Englishand Chinese. Only thus can the students improve the quality of vocabulary learning incollege English teaching.This thesis aims to see whether Chinese language exerts a positive influence onEnglish vocabulary learning, and if it has, how it influences the acquisition ofvocabulary and how to use the positive transfer to improve the acquisition of vocabulary.The research also tries to detect if mental transfer, as a non-linguistic factor, has anyeffect on vocabulary acquisition. The author uses statistics to test if the learner’s generalcomprehension ability in his/her native language and English proficiency are closelyrelated; if the learners’ native language proficiency has effect on their English Learningand if the theory of positive transfer of native language can promote English vocabularylearning.The experiment begins at March2012, mainly relies on Kellerman’s (1978)“breken” and “eye” experiments as models, and the subjects of which are selected fromtwo non-English major students in Chong Qing Normal University. This experiment isdivided into2groups8subgroups attending four kinds of tests respectively with the aim of predicting positive transferability of Chinese adjective “热” on “hot”. The meansof interview, questionnaire and review is applied in data collection, and statisticalmethod is applied in the data analysis.