An Empirical Study On Backward Transfer In The Grammar Of Chinese-english Bilingual Students

Researches on Language Transfer in the Second Language Acquisition(SLA)field have long focused on the forward transfer of learners' first language(L1)to the second one(L2).While in the recent twenty years,scholars have begun to testify the existence of backward transfer,whose direction is from L2 to L1,and explain its characteristics.However,backward transfer,especially that on grammar,did not receive much attention from we domestic academic circle.Therefore,based on previous researches,the present empirical study aims to demonstrate the grammatical influence of English backward transfer on Chinese context,by conducting an experiment on 131 Chinese-English bilinguals in Shanghai Jiao Tong University.This experiment adopts test paper as a main tool and is supplemented by face-to-face interviews,thus taking advantage of both qualitative and quantitative methods.The test paper includes two tasks: one is to narrate a 3-minute long silent film in Chinese,which is a discourse task(DT).The other one is to judge the grammaticality of 16 Chinese sentences which concentrate on differences between Chinese and English.This is a syntax task(ST).The result of the test shows that,in the discourse task,phenomena of grammatical backward transfer are found in each experimental group,and can be classified into seven main types.While in the syntax task,all the grades given by subjects appear to show the influences of English grammar to some extent.But they vary in degree among different grammatical phenomena,and even among different structures within the same grammar topic.In addition,the relationship between subjects' English level and their transfer degree is not necessarily a positive correlation,but usually shows an inverted U-shape.These all hint a kind of great imbalance.On the foundation that synthesize all the experimental data and interview materials,this paper concludes that language competition & simplifying tendency and people's collective unconsciousness are the main causes of English's grammatical backward transfer to Chinese.On the other hand,grammatical markedness and threshold,as well as language attitude and improvement of overall language ability,are put forward to explain the imbalance of the transfer degree.