A Study On Reverse Conceptual Transfer Of English Learners Of Greetings In China

Reverse conceptual transfer is an important aspect of the study of transfer. Conceptual transfer put forward stands for the essence of transfer has been in cognitive level instead of language knowledge level so that researchers begin to think from the development of concepts. They think the reason of cross-linguistic influence. It has vital implication to English teaching. It makes people recognize that English learning is not only to remember some vocabulary and grammar rules, what is more, it is to internalize the cognitive mode of rules in order to change habitual mother tongue instead, and to learn to think in English. It can solve the problem of non-native expression from the essence.The thesis mainly studies whether there are some differences when 70 college students greet in English and produce reverse conceptual transfer in certain two situations. The research questions are as follows:(1) Do learners in English major and Chinese major present differences when formulating greetings?(2) Do learners in English and Chinese major develop reverse conceptual transfer when making greetings?Six parts consist of the thesis. The first part tells the research background, research purpose and significance. The second part looks back to the present condition of reverse conceptual transfer at home and abroad. The theoretical framework is the third part, which includes the theory of conceptual transfer and requests. The forth part tells the participants, instruments and procedures of the study. The research questions are as follows:(1) Do learners in English major and Chinese major present differences when formulating greetings?(2) Do learners in English major and Chinese major develop reverse conceptual transfer when making greetings? The investigate takes the discourse completion test of certain two situations; there are four questions designed according to each situation and uses the SPSS to analyze the data. The fifth part deals with the results and makes a discussion about it. It tells the differences between the two majors when making requests by Mean and SD. Furthermore, it also tells the differences that students in different majors make greetings in the certain two situations by T—test. The thesis intends to study the possible reasons that students in English major produce reverse conceptual transfer more than those who are in Chinese major when making greetings.Based on the above analysis, the thesis draws the following conclusions: 1) English learners make greetings differently on the 8 questions; 2) Although both of the two majors produce reverse conceptual transfer when making greetings, learners in English major transfer a lot because they are influenced by English for a long time. The limited conceptual transfer may have something to do with the Englishstandard of learners and learning environment and so forth.The major findings, the limitations and the suggestions for future study consist of the sixth part of the thesis.