Chinese (L1) And English (L2) Transfer In Japanese (L3) Acquisition

With the advancement of globalization,the number of multilingual learners who learn two or more foreign languages is increasing,which provides the necessary social and educational environment for the Third Language Acquisition(TLA)research.The TLA is a comparatively new research field which appears in late 1980 s with the deeper development of SLA and transfer theory.And the research of TLA is still in its infant stage and has great research potential and prospect.In China,most of Japanese majors have learned English as their L2,and this study is undertaken to find out the influences of transfer(positive transfer and negative transfer)of Chinese(L1)and English(L2)on the third language(Japanese)learning as well as to provide some instructive suggestions for Japanese(L3)learning.Through an empirical study on subjects of 40 sophomore undergraduates from Suzhou College who are Japanese majors and whose language acquisition order is Chinese,English and Japanese,this thesis discusses the relation of language transfer among Chinese,English and Japanese.Qualitative and quantitative methods,which include a questionnaire,a Japanese vocabulary test and an interview,are applied to find the links between errors and inter-linguistic transfer and hence some instructive suggestions on Japanese acquisition are put forward.By applying error analysis,contrastive analysis as well as the SPSS software to handle collected data,findings are as follows:1)For Japanese-majors,language transfer from L1-Chinese to L3-Japanese is in morphological,phonetic,semantic and word-class aspects.Specifically,most positive transfer happens in morphological and word-class aspects,while negative transfer is mainly shown in phonetic and semantic aspects.2)For Japanese-majors,language transfer from L2-English to L3-Japanese is in phonetic,semantic and word-class aspects.Specifically,most positive transfer happens in morphophonological aspect,while negative transfer occurs in word-class and semantic aspects.