An Empirical Study On French Pronoun Acquisition Among China’s English Majors With French As Second Foreign Language And Its Pedagogical Implications

With the development of economics and culture, a mounting number of people in China work hard to employ more than one foreign language. Most Schools of Foreign Language in colleges and universities offer a second foreign language course as compulsory. Due to their previous learning experience, more than half of English majors in China choose French as their second foreign language as they consider that French has a lot in common with English and is easy to learn.It is true that there are many similarities between both languages. However, many English majors do very poor in French acquisition, especially in aspect of French pronoun. The present paper tries to examine English transfer on French pronoun acquisition, both positive and negative.At first, the paper reviews some previous achievement in this field. Colossal scholars and linguists at home and abroad have done a lot of job in the study of third language acquisition. They try to compare and contrast several of the existing languages and lay the foundation and basic theories in comparative linguistics. Some of them have juxtaposed English and French, and made efforts to find out the differences and similarities. Lexicon, grammar and syntax have already been touched. But scarcely has there been any comprehensive and thorough study on pronouns in both languages. This study is compensation in this field.Secondly, the theoretical foundation is Contrastive Analysis. Some types of English pronouns do not actually exist in French, and some types of French pronouns do not actually exist in English, such as les pronoms adverbiaux and les pronoms neutres. Some types of pronouns do exist in both languages but are used in totally differentiated ways. Some types of pronouns share the similar usage but have totally different word forms. And some kinds of linguistic phenomena are unique in French such as the elision. All of above should be paid due attention to.Thirdly, difference does not always lead to difficulty and errors so an empirical study related to pronoun is a need to check what really happens in real situations. S.P. Corder (1974) suggested a framework of error explanation and distinguished three types of error, i.e., interference error, intralingual error and developmental error. As interference error relates to English transfer a lot, it will be examined further in this study. To make a more profound and scientific research, Schachter and Clece-Murcia’s framework will be employed. They further divided interference error into overextension of analogy (OA error), transfer of structure (TS error) and interlingual/intralingual error (IE error).The present paper collects data from36subjects, senior English majors with French as second foreign language from Langfang Normal School. The language test consists of six parts and consumes about40minutes at all. The errors are collected and analyzed, and then grouped into OA error, TS error and IE error. It is obvious that the transfer from English on French pronoun acquisition is quite evident, and the distribution of three types of error is balanced. Finally, some pedagogical implications and learning tips are provided.