Bidirectional Transfer In L1and L2Essays By Chinese-english Learners: Cohesive Devices And Textual Structures In Argumentation

Language transfer is a vital field of second language acquisition (SLA), whichhas long been a concern since1950s. It occurs frequently as a learning strategy bywhich the learner uses his or her knowledge of one language as a resource forformulating hypotheses about the forms, structures, functions, meanings, rules, andpatterns of another (e.g., R. Ellis,1994). Within the last few decades, the majority ofstudies have focused on its nature, reasons, processes, levels etc., that is, on the degreeto which learners’ first language (L1) transfer occurs in the process of secondlanguage (L2) learning (Krashen,1983; et al). However, to what extent learners’ L2affects their L1is almost neglected. According to Aneta Pavlenko and Scott Jarvis(2002), language transfer can be bidirectional, which exerts a great influence on anindividual’s use of both the L1and L2.By comparing learners’ cross-linguistic writing performance, this paper intendsto investigate whether bidirectional transfer occurs when Chinese English learners areengaged in English and Chinese writings. The corpus comes from32essays (16English and16Chinese respectively) completed by16Chinese undergraduates fromcomprehensive universities in Xi’an who do not major in English but have passed theCET-4. Quantitative and qualitative analyses are adopted in the study based on thecohesive devices and generic structures of the sample essays and to explore thereasons by referring to the participants’ sociocultural background, thinking modes, L2and L1writing instructions, etc., from the perspective of Contrastive Rhetoric. Themajor finding is that learners’ L1and L2are influencing each other at the discourselevel when they are trying to achieve coherence and logical progression by selectingcohesive devices and generic structures in their essays. By comparing and analyzinglearners’ Chinese and English essays from both macro-and micro-levels, the studyhas much significance in SLA researches, L2writing pedagogies and the effectivenessof ESL learning in that it widens the scope of the study of language transfer byjustifying the bidirectionality.