评价网 > 科教论文 > 文学毕业论文 > 英语论文 > 正文

论母语迁移对中国学生英语学习的影响(1)(2)

2017-08-06 05:26
In psychology, transfer refers to ‘the phenomenon of previous knowledge being extended to the area of new knowledge, i.e. the influence which the learning or remembering of one thing has on the learning and remembering of another thing’. [2]P12 Therefore first language (L1) refers to the influence that learner’s L1 exerts over the acquisition of an L2. [3]P51 Accordingly, errors in L2 learning are explained as the interference of learners’ mother tongue (or the first language/L1) in learning the target language because of differences between the two. Interference as such is called negative transfer. Similarities between L1 and L2, on the other hand, are believes to facilitate the learning of L2. Facilitation as such is called positive transfer. In other words, difference between L1 and L2 cause learning difficulty and result in errors, while similarities facilitate learning. [2]P12-13 Owing to the different language systems that Chinese and English belong to, L1 mostly plays a negative role in Second Language Acquisition.
2．The reason of causing transfer
Transfer would not happen without any condition. So does the transfer in languages.
“L1 is considered as a kind of ‘input from the inside’. This ‘input’ will occur just under some conditions. There are some cognitive constraints that govern the transfer of L1 knowledge. One such constraint identified by Kellerman (1983) is as follows:
‘I want now to examine one factor that will act as a constrainer or a trigger of transfer. This is the learner’s notion of the relations between the L1 and L2… if L1 and L2 were very different, the lack of available correspondences would, in the initial stages at least, act as a bar to transfer, since the learner is unable to make the necessary cross-lingual tie-ups.
… Transferability is to be seen as a theoretical notion, which derives from native speakers’ own perception of the structure of their language. If a feature is perceived as infrequent, irregular, semantically or structurally opaque, or in any other way exceptional, what we could in other words call ‘psycho linguistically marked’, then its transferability will be inversely proportional to its degree of markedness. … it is important to emphasize that the relative transferability of structures is determined by the L1 and is thus independent of the nature of the L2, though they will interact with the learner’s perception of the L1-L2 distance.’[4]P62-63 （转载自http://zw.nseac.coM科教作文网）
From the above words Kellerman said, we can find that transfer will occur when the two languages have some correspondences between each other. For if we can not find any correspondences between them, we would not connect them, and the transfer would not happen. For example, some kids may confuse ‘tangerine’ and ‘orange’, because they are all fruits and their appearances look alike. They would never confuse ‘orange’ and ‘shoe’ for they are two different things completely. Such difference makes people to avoid the transfer. It forms a bar to transfer and prevent the transfer happen. Therefore it is just the commonness between two things that cause transfer but not specialty. So does the transfer appear in Chinese and English. There do have commonness between them actually, for example in letter, in syntax, in culture. (Although the differences between them are the main part, there still have the commonness. That is a special commonness between languages. For example, in English and Chinese, the main part of a sentence is the subject and the predicate. This is the commonness.) When the learners are aware of the existence of that commonness, they would transfer the rules of L1 into L2 unconsciously. Furthermore, if the rules between two languages are completely alike, the positive transfer appears. If the rules were different in some areas (Maybe we can call it the specialty in the commonness.), the negative transfer would appear.