An Empirical Study On Senior High School Students' English Past Tense Acquisition From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

Language transfer is an inevitable phenomenon in second or foreign language acquisition.At the end of last century,with the prevalence of cognitive linguistics,scholars began to focus gradually on the internal process of language transfer,aiming to explore the cognitive mechanism behind it.Since Jarvis and Pavlenko(2008)put forward the Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis,a large number of scholars have carried out many empirical studies involving vocabulary,syntax and discourse.However,based on the previous studies,few of them are concerned with tense.Therefore,from the perspective of conceptual transfer,this empirical study concentrates on Chinese senior high school students' English past tense acquisition,taking both comprehension and production into consideration and digs out the conceptual source behind their errors.It intends to answer three research questions as follows:(1)Does conceptual transfer occur when Chinese senior high school students comprehend English past tense? If yes,in what aspects?(2)Does conceptual transfer occur when Chinese senior high school students produce English past tense? If yes,in what aspects?(3)Are there any differences between top students and bottom students in the acquisition of English past tense? If yes,what are the differences?The participants of this study are 52 students of one natural class in Grade One from a senior high school in Panyu District,Guangzhou.Firstly,taking advantage of a grammatical judgement task,participants are invited to select the judgemental clues of some designed items to check their comprehension on English past tense.Then,with the help of a video clip from the film Alice in Wonderland,a written story-narration task is assigned to participants to collect related errors in their production of English past tense.At last,the study adopts the semi-structured interview in order to explore the conceptual source of English past tense errors among senior high school students.The data collected were analysed from conceptual transfer perspective and produced the following findings:(1)Conceptual transfer does occur when participants comprehend English past tense.In detail,participants tend to identity English past tense through the clue of temporal adverbials.At the same time,they are inclined toconsider the auxiliary verb “did” as Chinese aspect markers “guo” and “le”.Lastly,in temporal adverbial clause,they prefer to resort to the subordinate clause to identify the tense of the event.(2)Among the six types of errors in participants' English past tense production,the misuse of auxiliary verb “be”(Type1),errors in compound sentence(Type2),errors in complex sentence(Type3)and the mix-use of different tenses(Type5)are highly connected with conceptual transfer.The detailed reasons are as follows: participants adopts lexical device to convey temporal information while English takes grammatical device;the Chinese language is chunky and discrete while English is cohesive and continuous;Chinese prefers to put the background information of time before the key incident while English is opposite.All the above can be attributed to the integrative,figurative and circular modes of thinking of Chinese.(3)There are significant differences in both comprehension and production of English past tense between top students and bottom students.Generally speaking,bottom students are more greatly influenced by Chinese concepts,therefore,they make more errors in practical use of past tense.In a word,conceptual transfer does occur in the acquisition of English past tense among Chinese senior high school students and compared with top students,bottom students are more dependent on relevant Chinese concepts to help them acquire English past tense.In language teaching,how to alleviate or even get rid of the interference from the concepts in one's mother tongue is an important subject deserving further exploration.