Effects Of Second Language Accuisition On First Language

Language transfer, from a broad sense, refers to any kind of movement and/or influence of concepts, knowledge, skills or linguistic elements, in either direction, between the L1and the subsequent language(s). After over sixty years’development, the study of language transfer has gained fruitful achievements in foreign research field, with most of those studies focusing on native language transfer and there were few studies devoted to the study of backward transfer, i.e., transfer from foreign language to native language. Since the beginning of the1980s, backward language transfer has been testified by several foreign researchers and has gradually become a systematic discipline. However, few studies on this issue were found in China. Therefore, based on previous researches and combining the theories of language mode in bilinguals’mind, the present study aims to demonstrate and analyze the influence of English backward transfer in Chinese context from the perspective of passive voice.The present study employs the test method of parallel questionnaires. The participants involved in this study are66sophomores who are divided into control group and experimental group, with the latter receiving a one-week intensive training of English passive voice. The data is collected through sentence judgment task and then SPSS18.0is adopted to analyze the data. By comparing the test results of pretest and posttest, the author found that experimental group experienced remarkable influence from intensive training of English passive voice when judging Chinese passive sentences. In addition, the present study arrived at another two conclusions: first, among the three types of Chinese passive sentences involved in this study, the participants’judgment on Chinese notional passive sentence is the most greatly affected, followed by passive verb sentence and simplified passive sentence; second, participants’ English proficiency level is found to be related to their performance in the tests. Participants with the highest and lowest English proficiency tend to receive less effect from the experiment than participants with the medium. Based on the above research findings, some pedagogical suggestions for English teaching are put forward:1) to place an emphasis on the contrast between English and Chinese in the process of language teaching;2) to employ diverse teaching strategies according to the proficiency level of English learners;3) to attach importance to the role of translation in language teaching so as to deepen the learners’ understanding of the two languages and increase their ability of language use.