The Influence of The Negative Transfer of Chinese on English Vocabulary Study 英语论文.doc
《The Influence of The Negative Transfer of Chinese on English Vocabulary Study 英语论文.doc》由会员分享,可在线阅读,更多相关《The Influence of The Negative Transfer of Chinese on English Vocabulary Study 英语论文.doc(11页珍藏版)》请在三一文库上搜索。
1、The Influence of The Negative Transfer of Chinese on English Vocabulary StudyI. Introduction Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is a very complex process. The factors which influence the rate and level of achievement of the second language are various, such as age, motivation, personalities, language
2、 aptitude, cognitive process, etc. However, the mother tongue plays a very important part in it, for it always functions in the process of Second Language Acquisition, especially in non-naturalistic learning surroundings. In the elementary stage of Second Language Acquisition, language learners simp
3、ly use the knowledge of the mother tongue for reference. As Rod Ellis (Ellis, 1999:37-38) has suggested, making use of the mother tongue embodies a common psychological process, that is, learners have to depend on what they have learnt in their mother tongue to help them understand the knowledge of
4、a new language. The transfer of the mother tongue refers to the influence that the learners mother tongue exerts over the acquisition of the second language.The transfer theory believes that, if the habits of the mother tongue are supposed to help to form and develop the habits of the target languag
5、e (the second language), or more concretely to say, if the mother tongue possesses certain similar or totally identical characteristics as the target language, the mother tongue will facilitate the learning of the target language. This effect is known as positive transfer. On the other hand, if the
6、habits of the mother tongue are supposed to prevent the learner from learning the habits of the target language, that is, the learner has to totally depend on the language rules of the mother tongue to learn the target language, the problems of the negative transfer arises.In most of the western cou
7、ntries, language learners learn their second languages that have the same origin as their mother tongue. Similar cultural background and language characteristics make the positive transfer appear more often than the negative transfer in the learning process. Nevertheless, the foreign language that C
8、hinese students mainly learn in the school is English. Compared with Chinese, it comes from a different language family. Its different cultural tradition and language characteristics (including pronunciation, vocabulary and grammatical system) make our Chinese students encounter much more difficulti
9、es than the students from the western countries. II. DemonstrationWhen Chinese students start learning English, they have been equipped with the solid foundation of knowledge of Chinese and deep-rooted Chinese way of thinking, they mainly learn English in the school, and they just use it to communic
10、ate with their Chinese classmates and teachers. Moreover, those real communicative opportunities are very limited for them. Chinese inevitably influences the English study of our Chinese students, especially the English vocabulary study. Although the acquisition of English vocabulary has something i
11、n common with the acquisition of Chinese vocabulary, they also have many differences. When our Chinese students begin to learn English vocabulary, they are definitely influenced by the system of Chinese vocabulary that they can always depend on to express themselves freely. On the basis of conceptua
12、l system of Chinese, they learn new language symbols. However, there is a great distinction between conceptual system of English and that of Chinese. Owing to the limitations of learning environment and the differences in aim and level of achievement, when middle school students dont know how to tac
13、kle the problems on English oral and written expressions, they will naturally turn to their mother tongue. Under these circumstances, using the knowledge of Chinese vocabulary in the communication to express their ideas might bring about the negative transfer of Chinese in English vocabulary study.
14、It usually falls into the following three types:A. The negative transfer caused by the non-equivalent conceptual meaning of vocabulary The conceptual meaning refers to the base meaning of the word (Hu Wenzhong, 1985:95). The closer the meaning is to the base meaning of the word, the more likely it i
15、s to be transferred. Both Chinese and English vocabulary has many non-equivalent conceptual meanings. However, most of the students cannot distinguish which words they have learnt in English have non-equivalent conceptual meanings, so they are prone to make errors. For example,“It was quite warm whe
16、n I got here, but the climate suddenly turned cold overnight.”Here “climate” refers to the average weather conditions at a particular place over a period of years, but in this sentence, the change from “warm” to “cold” means the particular condition at a certain time, so “weather” is the correct cho
17、ice. To some students, these two words have the same meaning. Its hard for them to tell the difference so that they usually take it for granted that these two words could be used indiscriminately.Lets look at another example:“He also studies French except English.“Except” means “but not, leaving out
18、”. Here “except English” means English is not the subject he is learning, but when we look at the second word “also”, its obvious that the word “except” is not correct. The right answer is “besides” which means “as well as”. Students easily mix up the conceptual meanings of these two words. They can
19、t perceive the distinction between them so that they might make such errors.B. The negative transfer caused by the non-equivalent connotative meaning of vocabularyConnotative meaning refers to the meaning suggested by a word in addition to the formal meaning or nature of the word (that is to say, th
20、e meaning except the conceptual meaning of the word), such as the commendatory or derogatory implication of a word, the tone of a word, etc (Hu Wenzhong, 1985:96). Most Chinese students find it hard to understand the connotative meaning of a word, especially when it relates to the specific cultural
21、background and language traditions. They feel too puzzled to grasp it. For instance, “John can be relied on. He eats no fish and plays the game.”When most students first look at these two sentences, they might wonder what is the relation between them, as it seems that the two phrases “to eat no fish
22、” and “to play the game” have no connection with the meaning of the first sentence. Actually in English history, Catholics could eat fish in the fast days, but when the Protestantism was established, the Protestants fought against the Catholics. They refused to eat fish in the fast days to show thei
23、r royalty for their new religious belief. So “to eat no fish” means royalty and faithfulness. As for the phrase “ to play the game”, it originally means “to contest according to the rules”. Here it refers to “justice and honesty”. Thus, the second sentence can be explained in this way: “John is fait
24、hful, fair and honest.” Students ignore the cultural meaning of this phrase, so they just judge the sentence from the surface meaning of the words so that they might misunderstand it. There are many synonyms in English vocabulary. With the development of language, particularly in the aspect of Engli
- 配套讲稿:
如PPT文件的首页显示word图标,表示该PPT已包含配套word讲稿。双击word图标可打开word文档。
- 特殊限制:
部分文档作品中含有的国旗、国徽等图片,仅作为作品整体效果示例展示,禁止商用。设计者仅对作品中独创性部分享有著作权。
- 关 键 词:
- The Influence of Negative Transfer Chinese on English Vocabulary Study 英语论文
链接地址:https://www.31doc.com/p-3903231.html