A Study On The Language Transfer Of English Majors’ L1(Chinese) And L2(English) On L3(Japanese) Lexical Acquisition

With the rapid development of politics, economy and culture, most people find that it is not enough to acquire only two languages so that they try to learn three or more languages as needed. There are also more and more linguistics and researchers begin to pay attention to the field of third language acquisition. However, the study of third language acquisition, which began at the end of the 19 th century, is still in its primary stage. On the other hand, the process of language transfer has become the focus in third language acquisition.Till now, most of the researches in third language acquisition are under the context of European language environment, among which the first and second language are found to have great influence on the third language. In China, most of the studies mainly focus on those students whose L3 are European languages, such as French, German and Spanish. But in fact, there are lots of trilingual students who study English and Japanese as their second and third languages while the research in this field are quite rarely seen. To provide more effective ways for learning and teaching Japanese as the third language, this thesis discussed the relation of language transfer among Chinese-English-Japanese, taking 62 third year English majors from Xi’an International Studies University who are LI-Chinese, L2-English and L3-Japanese as subjects. Combining both qualitative and quantitative methods, which include questionnaire, Japanese lexical test and interview, the author tries to provide inference to both Japanese lexical learning and teaching, especially for the students and teachers in northwestern China. On the other hand, this thesis also develops the theory of third language acquisition and language transfer in China as well as enriches the language transfer research on the influence among Chinese, English and Japanese.By using contrastive analysis and error analysis and applying SPSS to analyze the collected data, major findings could be concluded as follows: 1) For English-majors, language transfer of L1-Chinese to L3-Japanese happens on aspects of morphology, pronunciation, semantics and word-class. Specifically, more positive transfer is shown on morphological(88.22%) and semantic(94.81%) aspect, while negative transfer mainly occurs on phonetic aspect(75.32%) and word-class(84.03%). 2) Language transfer of L2-English to L3-Japanese happens on aspects of morphophonology, semantics and word-class. Influence of positive transfer(all above 80%) might be greater than that of negative transfer(all above 60%).