Study of the Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue at the Level of Lexis in Chinese College Students’ English Writing

Abstract：English and Chinese belong to different languages and have great differences in morphology，lexis，syntax，pragmatics，and etc.Many researches at home and abroad indicate that the negative transfer of mother tongue takes place in the process of Chinese students’ English writing.However，most of the studies concentrate on the general introduction of the negative transfer of mother tongue and analysis of its cause and effect； fewer studies explore the negative transfer on lexis thoroughly.On the basis of the theories of mother tongue transfer，this paper aims to study the lexical transfer of Chinese to English writing.

Key words：Negative transfer of mother tongue；English writing；lexis；strategies

1 Introduction

Nowadays，English writing is playing significant role in our life.In fact，there exists a great problem in Chinese students’ English writing because of their dependence on Chinese.Most students feel difficult to write an accurate and fluent passage because of kinds of problems caused by the transfer between English and Chinese.It is the negative transfer of mother tongue that hinders the students’ writing competence on most occasions.

2 Definition of the negative transfer

Odlin （2001：17） has suggested that transfer is an impact resulting from the similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously acquired.Language transfer can be classified into two categories： Negative Transfer and Positive Transfer in terms of the difference and similarities between L1 and L2.（Hu，2011：40） Negative Transfer refers to the use of native language patterns or rule that leads to an error or inappropriate form in the target language.

3 The negative transfer on the level of lexis

3.1 Negative transfer to word meaning

Most words in English have many meanings or shades of meaning.Following a functional approach，Leech （1981） categorizes seven kinds of meaning，and the different kinds of meaning have induced some problems for students to figure out the most appropriate meaning of words.Most of time students may use some English equivalents whose meanings are similar to those Chinese when they cannot express his thoughts precisely and accurately because of his deficiency in vocabulary.

3.2 Misuse of part of speech

As is known to us，words can be used as different part of speech both in English and Chinese but the differences between Chinese and English in part of speech are significant.The vocabulary of Chinese is mainly divided according to the lexical meaning of the word，and the Chinese vocabulary has no special markings.The part of speech in English is divided according to its grammatical function in the sentence.English words have their own word marks，and if there is no change in the affixes，there would be no conversion of the part of speech.

3.3 Errors in Lexical Collocation

Lexical collocation refers to the habitual combination of words and words rather than accidental combination.English vocabulary collocation is largely a habitual or routine use of words.From the grammatical rules of the word，the errors of the learners’ lexical collocation are mainly manifested in the collocation errors between the content words and the collocation between the content words and the prepositions.Meanwhile，the mother tongue of the negative transfer of the lexical collocation brought about by the semantic aspects of the error.

4 Conclusion

Language transfer to English learning is inevitable，but not all types of language transfer are bad phenomena，because language transfer includes positive transfer and negative transfer.The reason why the negative transfer occurs frequently is that students have limited proficiency both in language ability of mother tongue and target language.Meanwhile，it is true that the native language environment always have an impact on the language transfer，especially for English learners in China.

References

[1]Odlin，T.Language Transfer：Cross-linguistic Influence in Language Learning [M].Shanghai：Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press，2001.

[2]Leech G.Semantics：The Study of Meaning，2nd Ed[J].Penguin Books，1981.

[3]Hu Zhuanglin.Linguistics：A Course Book，Fourth edition[M].Beijing University Press，2011.

作者簡介

喬艷（1995—），女，漢族，陜西漢中人，學歷：碩士研究生；單位：陜西師范大學；研究方向：學科教學（英語）。