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1、Negative Transfer in Foreign Language LearningAbstractAccording to the language transfer theory, it is assumed that the learners mother tongue will positively or negatively affect ones learning a foreign language. When there are differences between ones mother tongue and target language, the mother
2、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
3、 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 bee
4、n 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. Thats what we call negative transfer. Therefore, differences between the native language and the foreign language should be taken into c
5、onsideration 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 t
6、o 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 t
7、ransfer 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 E
8、nglish learning 3.1 Negative transfer in pronunciation When people hear a speaker with a “foreign accent”, they often try to guess the speakers 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
9、 “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
10、 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 / for an example. Many English learners mispronounce them as they do not exist
11、 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 / 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 mispron
12、ounced 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 differe
13、nces. 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 frequen
14、tly 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 word
15、s has a different vowel sound, with the sound 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 langu
16、age, 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, t
