Language transfer 语言迁移

Negative Transfer in Foreign Language Learning AbstractAccording 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 implication1. IntroductionLanguage 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 transferLanguage 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 learning3.1 Negative transfer in pronunciationWhen 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 levelSome 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 levelAlthough 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 thesound varying according to the acoustic prominence of the syllable. Such interactions have important implications not only for speech production but also for comprehension. When non-native speakers do not use a stress pattern that is a norm in the target language, this can result in a total misperception by listeners. Every English word has a definite place for the stress and one is not allowed to change it.In Chinese, stress does not have great influence. Thus stress errors are frequently committed by a Chinese learner.One of the most important typological distinctions between languages involves tone and intonation. Chinese is a “tone language”. It has four tones, that is, the level tone, the rising tone, the falling-rising tone and the falling tone. The syllable “ma”represents “mother”when it is used with a high level tone, and “horse” with a low rising tone. In contrast, English words have no fixed tones and their meanings are not identified by tones. In fact, the words in English sentences are influenced by different intonation. Different intonation can express different communicative intentions, attitudes and emotions. In other words, the meaning of a word in one English sentence not only has the meaning of vocabulary but also the meaning of the corresponding intonation. When Chinese students read English sentences, they are apt to replace the English intonation with fixed lexical tones instead of subordinating the lexical tones to the sentence intonation. As a result, every English word is pronounced clearly. Thus, the flexibility of English words is destroyed.3.2 Negative transfer in vocabularyA fundamental issue in the study of semantic transfer is the relation between language and thought. Expressions such as “learning to think in English”reflect a common belief that learning a particular language requires adopting a worldview which, to some extent, is unique to that language. When Chinese learners start learning English, they have been equipped with the deep-rooted Chinese way of thinking and their mother tongue inevitably influences their learning, especially the learning of vocabulary.3.2.1 The negative transfer caused by the non-equivalent conceptual meaning of wordsThe conceptual meaning is also called denotative or cognitive meaning, is the essential and inextricable part of what language is, and is widely regarded as the central factor in verbal communication. The negative transfer often occurs when there is only a partial identity of conceptual meaning. “It was quite warm when I got here, but the climate suddenly changed.”“C limate” refers to the average weather conditions at a particular place over a period of years, but in this sentence, the change means the particular condition at a certain time, so “weather” is the correct choice. To some students, these two words have the same conceptual meaning. It’s hard for them to tell the difference so that they usually take it for granted that these two words could be used indiscriminately.Let’s look at another example. “He also studies French except English. “Except” means “but not, leaving out”. So “except English” means that English is not the subject he is learning. B ut when we look at the second word “also”, it’s obvious that the word “except” is not correct. “B esides” should be the right answer as it means “as well as”. Chinese learners tend to mix up the conceptual meanings of these two words for they not perceive the distinction between them.3.2.2 The negative transfer caused by the non-equivalent connotative meaning of wordConnotative meaning is the communicative value that a word or a combination of words has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. Compared with conceptual meaning, connotative meaning is peripheral, and relatively unstable, that is, it may vary according to culture, historical period, and the experience of the individual. When we study English, we usually memorize a group of words such as grin, beam, smile and smirk. They are all types of smile. The real differences between them lie in their connotative meanings. Beam is a smile which connotes happiness, while smirk is a smile which connotes gloating of some kind. Most Chinese learners find it hard to distinguish the connotative meanings of words, especially words which are called synonyms.In compositions, some learners use the word “peasant” which has a derogatory meaning in the present English dictionary. It refers to persons without education ormanners. If someone uses this word in their communication, they hold contempt on that person. Therefore, westerners prefer to use the word “farmer.” Without knowing the connotative meaning of different words, learners are very likely to commit mistakes.3.3 Negative transfer in grammarThere are often grammatical restrictions found in one language but not in another and such restrictions can occasion difficulty. A French-speaking student may make a sentence like this: At sixty-five years old they must retire themselves because this is a rule of society. While the form “retire”reflects a true French-English cognate, the French lexical item has a grammatical restriction that the ESL student applied erroneously to the English form- the use of the reflexive pronoun is necessary in French, whereas the use of the English reflexive themselves is not grammatical in the context of the sentence.3.3.1 Negative transfer in Syntax levelA great deal of evidence has been found for syntactic negative transfer in studies of word order, relative clauses, and negation.3.3.1.1 Word orderWord order has been one of the most intensively studied syntactic properties in linguistics. “Japanese learners of English do not at any time produce writing in which the verb is wrongly placed sentence-finally.” When the Japanese speak English, many times they put objects before verbs since the basic order of Japanese is SOV and the basic order of English SVO. The vast majority of human languages have CSO, SVO, or SOV as their basic word order. Yet while most languages can be compared in terms of these three patterns, they vary considerably in terms of rigidity. Speakers of a flexible language may use several word orders in English even though English word order is quite rigid. Finnish is a flexible SVO language. Speakers of Finnish may make such a sentence “This weekend got F. any fish”when they actually want to express that “This weekend F. caught no fish”. The sentence made by a French “I think it’s very good the analysis between the behavior of animals and the person” also reflect the relatively flexible word order of French. Chinese also has SVO as its basicorder but it’s relatively flexible compared with English.Other constituents besides S, V, and O are also subject to word-order rules. In noun phrases in English, for example, articles normally precede adjectives and nouns in the noun phrase and languages generally have rules specifying the occurrence of elements within noun phrases, verb phrases and other constituents. Since the rules governing the position of adjectives, adverbs, and other word classes vary considerably form one language to the next, it is natural to expect to find cases of word-order negative transfer in constituents. There is a strong tendency for Chinese speakers to follow Chinese instead of English norms for the replacement of adverbial elements, as seen in the following error: I very much like movies. From this we can see that native language influence does account well for the vast majority of the errors.3.3.1.2 Relative clausesEnglish primarily relies on a right branching direction, in which the relative clauses appear to the right of the head noun. In contrast, Chinese primarily relies on a left branching direction, in which modifying clauses appear to the left of the head noun. And the differences in branching directions favored in relative clause patterns occasion underproduction. Most Chinese learners seem to have often avoided using relative clauses in written compositions; in contrast, equally proficient students who speak Arabic and Persian used many more such clauses. Although the Arabic and Persian speakers produce a great number of errors in the relative clauses that they use, the similarity of patterns in the native and target languages apparently led them to attempt writing more sentences with relative constructions.In the case of relative clauses, another crucial factor is the grammatical role of nouns and pronouns. Restrictive relativization is a construct usually having a “domain noun”and invariably having a modifying clause. For example, the sentence “The musician who played at the concert is from China”has a relative construction consisting of a domain noun and a clause modifying the noun. One of the most common patterns in relative clauses is to have within the clause a pronoun with the same reference as the domain noun. This poses a great difficulty for Chinese wholearn English. There is considerable cross-linguistic variation in relative clause structures, and such variation occasions negative transfer.3.3.2 Negative transfer in semantic levelChinese and English belong to different language families. Thus there is a huge difference between the two grammatical systems. Chinese learners are prone to apply the grammatical rules of Chinese in their English learning. As a result, grammatical mistakes are frequently committed when Chinese learners study English. Chinese nouns have no plural forms and changing nouns into their plural forms is not easy for Chinese learners. They tend to decide the plural forms of English nouns based on Chinese abstract and non-abstract nouns. Usually errors would appear, such as “a good advice”, “a bad news”, “a fine weather”, “some changes”, “five equipments”, etc. On the other hand, some Chinese nouns are abstract, while the corresponding English nouns are countable and t hey have plural forms, such as “goods”, “table manners”, “many thanks”, “in high spirits”, etc.Influenced by the usage of the Chinese equivalent of “marry”, a lot of learners make sentences like “She married with a poor man.” The learner clearly thinks that the verb “marry”is intransitive as it is used this way in Chinese. It actually is a transitive verb in English. So we are supposed to say “She married a poor man”. Take the verb “serve” as another example. In Chinese way of thinking, the sentence goes like this: He serves for the people. But again “serve” is a transitive verb; “He serves people” is the correct answer. On the contrary, the Chinese equivalent of “laugh” is transitive while “laugh”is intransitive. So the sentence “I made a silly mistake and she laughed at me” should be changed into “I made a silly mistake and she laughed at me.”3.4 Negative transfer in cultureNegative transfer in culture refers to the cultural interference caused by cultural differences, which shows that people subconsciously use their cultural norms and values not only to guide their behaviors and thoughts but also to judge others’ behaviors and thoughts. Negative transfer in culture often results in communicative difficulties, misunderstandings and even hatred. When learners violate norms ofconversation in the target language, the violations are potentially much more serious than syntactic or pronunciation errors since such violations can affect what is often termed “the presentation of self.” Negative cultural transfer occurs in all processes of intercultural communication and foreign language learning and is of great significance in both fields.3.4.1 Negative Transfer of Surface-Structure CulturePoliteness is probably a universal notion; the expression of politeness in different societies varies considerably. One of the basic challenges in the study of politeness is to understand the differences of interpretation that different cultures make of certain kinds of behavior. The norms of linguistic politeness in France and the United States are the same in many situations, but there is at least one context in which the norms differ considerably-using the telephone. Telephone calls in France are seen as impositions more often than they are in the United States, and thus the etiquette of making calls in France more frequently requires callers to make an apologetic statement at the beginning of the call. Consequently, phone calls between French and American individuals who are bilingual but unfamiliar with the differences in telephone etiquette may give rise to perceptions of bizarre or rude behavior. Another most frequently quoted example is that when Chinese people is praised by a foreigner, they tend to be modest and say “where, where”, which makes foreigners puzzled and a little bit angry as they think that their judgment is doubted.Speakers of different languages prefer different levels of directness in their requests. For example, German speakers show a strong preference for modal forms suggesting a sense of obligation, whereas English speakers prefer modal forms with a weaker force, as in “Can you close the window?” Moreover, it appears that German speakers more often prefer declarative statements in contrast to English speakers, who more often prefer interrogative statements to make requests. The speech act study indicates that speakers of German often produce requests in ESL that are too direct and they may sound not very polite.Apologies also show considerable cross-linguistic variation and pose problems for second language learners. The comparison of the verbal behavior of speakers ofHebrew and English shows that English speakers use apologetic formulas more than the Hebrew speakers do. And native speakers of Hebrew generally use apologies when using English less often than native speakers of English do. Differences in the relations between apologies and other speech acts can lead to inappropriate uses of apologetic formulas. When English speakers cough or sneeze, they say “Excuse me”beforehand or afterwards. But it’s not the form in Chinese. So Chinese learners of English use “Excuse me” mush less than native speakers of English do.Requests and apologies are not the only types of speech acts that can cause difficulties in learning to be polite in a foreign language. Language-specific speech acts require learners to become familiar with very new patterns of culture. In second language acquisition, much of the difficulty in becoming a competent speaker is likely to come from the simultaneous existence of universal and specific elements in spoken interactions. The difficulty may be compounded by beliefs on the part of learners that their requests, their greetings, their facial expressions, their volume, and so on, are not arbitrary in the way that words in their native language are.3.4.2 Negative Transfer of deep-Structure CultureUnder the influence of traditional worldviews and value orientations, Chinese thinking patterns are characterized by synthesis, vagueness and retrospection; whereas thinking patterns of most native speakers of English are characterized by analysis, precision and anticipation. Influenced by the specific thinking patterns, Chinese people are used to talking or writing in a roundabout way and keeping off the point and often putting the most important or critical points at the end or even just to give a hint. Such a circular way of talking or writing is regarded as politeness in Chinese culture and it can save enough "face" for both sides. Native speakers of English, especially Americans, however, like coming straight to the point in conversations or writing. The topic is often mentioned at first so as to attract hearers’ or readers’ attention.In Sino-American communications, the transfer of thinking patterns often arises at the level of discourse whose realm of study has been extended to include literary discourse and whole fields of culture and symbolic systems, among whichface-to-face conversation within speech acts is paid more attention to. The following hypothetical conversation may demonstrate the striking difference in discourse pattern influenced by different thinking patterns. “Mr. Wong and Mr. Richardson have a conversation. Mr. Richardson has enjoyed this conversation and when they are ready to part he says to Mr. Wong that they really should get together to have lunch sometime. Mr. Wong says that he would enjoy that. After a few weeks, Mr. Wong begins to feel that Mr. Richardson has been rather insincere because he has not followed up his invitation to lunch with a specific time an d place”.The difference in discourse pattern expected by Asian speakers of English (such as Chinese) and by western speakers of English (such as Americans) is the source of the problem between Mr. Wong and Mr. Richardson. As is mentioned above, Americans often put the important points at the beginning of a conversation, while Chinese people are used to displacing important points until nearer the end of a conversation, which has led Mr. Wong to think that this mention of having lunch is of some importance to Mr. Richardson. Whether it is important to him or not, Mr. Wong believes that Mr. Richardson is seriously making an invitation to lunch. Mr. Richardson, however, has made such invitation at the end of his conversation because it is of little major significance. For him it does not signify any more than that he has enjoyed his conversation with Mr. Wong. It is not a specific invitation, but just a conversational way of parting with good feelings toward the other. It is this difference in discourse pattern that results in misunderstanding between two participants.In intercultural communication, people often take what they believe for granted because they have grown up in the culture and think their way is the best. In this case, they tend to transfer their own cultural values and beliefs to the situation of intercultural communication as guidelines for their behaviors, so that misunderstandings or ineffective communications arise.4. Implications for teachingWhat we talked above implicates that cross-linguistic influence has considerable potential to affect the course of second language acquisition. Therefore, in foreignlanguage learning and teaching the basis of language instruction was the differences between the native language and target language, contrastive Analysis came into fashion in the 1960s. Starting with describing comparable features of the native language and the target language, contrastive analysis compares the forms and meanings across these two languages to locate the mismatch or differences so that people can predict the possible learning difficulty learners may encounter. However, the contrastive analysis was soon found problematic, for many of the predictions of the target language learning difficulty formulated on the basis of contrastive analysis turned out to be either uninformative: teachers had known about these errors already, or inaccurate: predicted errors did not materialize in the learner language while errors did show up that the contrastive analysis had not predicted. People came to realize that “Difference” and “Difficulty” are not identical concepts. The once predominant contrastive analysis was gradually replaced by Error Analysis.The contrastive approach to learners’ errors sheds new light on people’s attitudes: the incorrect English sentence “He comes from China, Beijing” is produced according to the word order of Chinese, instead of the correct English word order “He comes from Beijing, China”. By error’s analysis, teachers know what the key points and important points are.There are many ways to help learners reduce the influence of negative transfer. 4.1 increasing the amount of language inputThe reason why many learners are influenced by negative transfer is that they are lack of input of the target language. Therefore, language learners should be given a large amount of foreign language input. By listening to original materials, learners know how native speakers speak English and they get the correct pronunciation; by reading original books, learners learn how native speakers write in English and get the correct usage of words. It helps learners reduce the influence of negative transfer in pronunciation as well as vocabulary.4.2 Getting a better understanding of the cultureLanguage is part of the culture and plays a very important role in it. In the broadest sense, language is the symbolic representation of the people, the history andtheir ways of living and thinking. On the other hand, language is influenced and shaped by culture. Therefore, learning a foreign language well means more than merely mastering the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. It also means learning to see the world as native speakers of the language do, learning to understand the way in which their language reflects the ideas, customs, and behaviors of the society. To better avoid negative transfer, learners should think in the second language and avoid relating everything to their native language. So getting students familiar with the culture in which the target language is used should be a goal for teachers.5.ConclusionThis paper is a preliminary attempt to explore the different variables affecting language transfer. It can be seen that language transfer is important to foreign language learning. To subdue negative transfer, learners should increase the amount of language input and have a better understanding of the culture in which the target language is used. The methods presented in the paper are finite. Teachers and learners can come up with many more feasible and practical methods to accomplish the formidable and complicated process of eliminating interference of the native language.Reference1. Terence Odlin. 1989. Cross-linguistic influence in language learning. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press2. 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