The Influence Of Positive Transfer Of Native Language For Mongolian College Students’English Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary learning is an important component in the process of English language learning. Effective vocabulary learning can lay a good base for the mastery of language, and cultivate the ability of language communication. Vocabulary remains a difficult problem in the process of English learning. According to the materials, we can find language transfer is one of the many factors that influence English learning, and it can not be overlooked.Language transfer has always been a central issue for at least a century in applied linguistics and second language acquisition. Since the end of the1980s, with the deepening of transfer study, the research on cross-linguistic influence between Chinese and English has attracted much more attention by researchers in China. Furthermore, with the increase of cross-linguistic influence study in China, language transfer from minority languages to English have become a new focus in this field. Language transfer, in this specific context, is the role of Mongolian plays in learning English as a foreign language. Many scholars have often held the view that mother tongue plays a negative role in learner’s English learning. Therefore, they strongly urge to avoid the interference of mother tongue in English learning. The author of this thesis believes that there exist great deals of similarities between Mongolian and English in many perspectives of phonetics, lexicon, and lexical semantics.This paper is aimed at studying the influence of mother tongue positive transfer on Mongolian students’English vocabulary learning, and exploring how it can improve their English vocabulary learning ability and quality of vocabulary teaching.Based on the previous research in language transfer, second language acquisition and vocabulary teaching theory, the author tries to give a detailed and specific explanation about the similarities between Mongolian and English languages in the aspects of vocabulary. The experiment-starts at September2012, and selects60Mongolian students enrolled in Inner Mongolia Normal University. The language translating test shows that mother tongue vocabulary is greatly related to vocabulary in target language. The results from questionnaire and interview indicate that it is necessary to exploit mother tongue positive transfer in English vocabulary learning and teaching.