Language transfer 语言迁移

Negative Transfer in Foreign Language Learning Abstract

According to the language transfer theory, it is assumed that the learner’s mother tongue will positively or negatively affect one’s learning a foreign language. When there are differences between one’s mother tongue and target language, the mother tongue tends to interfere with the learning of the foreign language. This paper attempts to give a brief analysis of negative transfer in students’pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and culture learning. It also discusses what pedagogical concerns the existence of negative transfer warrants and what learners can do to reduce the influence of negative transfer.

Key words: Native language, Negative transfer, pedagogical implication

1. Introduction

Language transfer has been an important issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and language learning. When language learners have been using their native language for many years, they are very likely to transfer those roles in their mother tongue into the foreign language that they are learning. That’s what we call negative transfer. Therefore, differences between the native language and the foreign language should be taken into consideration to find out what difficulties might be. At the same time, teachers as well as learners should come up with solutions to reduce the influence of negative transfer.

2. Defining negative transfer

Language transfer refers to speakers or writers applying knowledge from their native language to a second language. When the relevant unit or structure of both languages is the same, linguistic interference can result in correct language production called positive transfer. However, that language interference is most often discussed as a source of errors known as negative transfer. Negative transfer occurs when speakers and writers transfer items and structures that are not the same in both languages. Within the theory of contrastive analysis, the greater the differences between the two languages, the more negative transfer can be expected.

3. Manifestations of the negative transfer in English learning

3.1 Negative transfer in pronunciation

When people hear a speaker with a “foreign accent”, they often try to guess the speaker’s background. Often the clue seems to be how the individual talks. In such cases, questions put to the speaker such as “Are you German?”“Are you Spanish?” or “Are you Asian?”suggest an intuition about the nature of language, an awareness, however unconscious, that the native language of a speaker can somehow cause the individual to sound “foreign” in speaking another language. The detection of foreign accents is one example of the awareness that people often have of language transfer in pronunciation.

3.1.1 Negative transfer in segmental level

Some difficulties in pronouncing inaccurately are caused by the non-existence of the phonemes in the mother tongue. Take /v/ and /θ/ for an example. Many English learners mispronounce them as they do not exist in Mandarin, and their mistakes can be attributed to the similarity of these two sounds with Chinese [w] and [s]. Chinese learners’ performances on the sound of /æ/ are not quite satisfying, for the phoneme is often replaced by [e], a sound that is close to Chinese [ai], and thus happiness or apple is mispronounced by many learners. Two languages also frequently have sounds which may seem identical but which in fact are acoustically different and may be perceived to be divergent from the target by the listener. For example, a comparison of an English ∕d∕with a Saudi Arabian Arabic ∕d∕ shows several differences. Among the differences, the duration of an English ∕d∕ at the end of a word tends to be shorter than its Arabic counterpart.

3.1.2 Negative transfer in suprasegmental level

Although cross-linguistic influences on pronunciation frequently involve segmental contrasts, the influences are also frequently evident in suprasegmental contrasts involving stress, tone, rhythm, and other factors.

Stress patterns are crucial in pronunciation in English since they affect syllables in English between certain nouns and verbs, such as between combine COMbine and comBINE. The first syllable in these two words has a different vowel sound, with the