A Study Of First Language Transfer In Chinese EFL Learners’ Acquisition Of English Modal Verbs

Modal verbs, as the main device to express the modality, refer to words which express speakers’ emotions and attitudes. They are simple in form and complex in semantics, which pose great challenge to Chinese EFL learners. In recent years, the contrastive studies of modal verbs between Chinese and English are flourishing, however,few studies focus on the acquisition of English modal verbs from the perspective of language transfer. Thus, the present study addressed the following two research questions:(1) Does L1 have an effect on the Chinese learners’ acquisition of English modal verbs can and may? If so, how does L1 affect the Chinese learners’ acquisition of English modal verbs can and may.?(2) How does the L1 influence change with the Chinese learners’ improvement of English proficiency?90 Chinese participants including 30 high school sophomores, 30 sophomores of non-English majors and 30 juniors of English majors participated in the study. They were divided into three groups: low level group is made up of 30 high school sophomores.Medium-level group is comprised of 30 sophomores of non-English majors and high-level group is composed of 30 juniors of English majorsAll participants were required to take two tests including grammatical judgment test and translation test. At last, the author analyzed the data through the two tests and adopted Javis’(2000) unified methodological framework on the identification of L1 influence,came to the following conclusions:(1)L1 has effect on the Chinese learners’ acquisition of English modal verbs can and may.The result of data analysis showed that when the semantics of modal verbs in Chinese and English is similar, the percentage of right answer of can in two tests is 82.4% and 84.9 %respectively, the percentage of right answer of may in two tests is 85.2% and 91.1 % respectively.On the contrary, when the semantics of modal verbs in Chinese and English is different, the percentage of right answer of can in two tests is 38.6% and35.6 % respectively, the percentage of right answer of may in two tests is 32.2% and 28.9% respectively. This illustrates that the similarities of semantics between Chinese modal verbs and English modal verbs cause positive transfer and facilitate the acquisition of English modal verbs for Chinese EFL learners.Oppositely, the differences of semantics between Chinese modal verbs and English modal verbs may cause negative transfer. Furthermore, the study further found that when can express the sense of ability, the percentage of the right answer is the highest, 100% and 94.4% in two tests respectively. Likewise, when may express the sense of possibility, the percentage of accuracy isthe highest, 94.4% and 91.1% in two tests respectively. This showed that the acquisition of English modal verbs is also affected by semantic prototype and the prototypicality of senses further promote the acquisition of English modal verbs.(2)According to the research result, the percentage of negative transfer on the use of can in grammatical judgment test is 21.5%, 31.1% and 39.1% respectively. The percentage of negative transfer on the use of may in grammatical judgment test is21.7%,31.7% and 33.3%respectively. The percentage of negative transfer on the use of can in translation test is 34.4%,44.4% and 54.4% respectively. The percentage of negative transfer in the use of may in translation test is 17.4%,21.7% and 30.9% respectively. Therefore, it can be concluded that with improvement of Chinese EFL learners’ English proficiency, negative transfer of L1 gradually decreases.