A Probe Of Lexical Transfer In French Learning Of English Majors

Bilingual or multilingual education has been steadily gathering momentum when the world moved into the 21~stt century.The emphasis on learners'multilingual competence reflects the deepening international communication and the increasing demand for the requirements of multilingual talents.In China,this has directly led to the rise and development of third language learning,which has attracted the attention of a few scholars.When third language acquisition research(L3AR)emerged in the late 1980s,it was considered a new research field under second language acquisition.Subsequently,the transfer theory has entered the view of some researchers.But up till now,L3AR is still at the stage of slow growth,due to the diverse and complex situations.Concerning the French learning by Chinese English majors in colleges,the current research intends to answer the following questions:1)At the lexical level,do native language Chinese and L2 English have an impact on the learning process of L3 French?2)If lexical transfer does exist,which language(English or Chinese)may have a greater influence?3)What learning problems does lexical transfer mainly reflect?Based on the theory of language transfer,taking 40 English major students who learn French as their second foreign language in Shanxi Normal University as the research subjects,French writing samples were collected.Aided with a questionnaire,the author analyzed the errors in the writing samples and explored the influence of previous acquired languages on French acquisition.Finally,the data obtained from the study was analyzed and results discussed.The main findings are as follows:1)Both L1 Chinese and L2 English have an influence on the learning process of L3 French.2)Through error analysis and comparison,the author found that the influence of English transfer is stronger than that of Chinese.3)Students can generally find common points between two similar languages,and use acquired language knowledge to promote French learning.However,due to the limitations of language proficiency,the partially acquired language also hinders French learning.