The Effect of Mother Tongue over Foreign Language Learning.doc

the effect of mother tongue over foreign language learning 母语对外语学习的影响 contents acknowledgements.i abstractii 摘要摘要.iii 1 introduction.1 2 the definition of transfer and related theory 2 3 the promotion of positive transfer over foreign language learning 4 4 the hinder of negative transfer over foreign language learning.6 4.1 phonetic transfer7 4.2 lexical transfer.8 4.3 grammatical transfer.11 4.4 pragmatic transfers12 5 the strategy of preventing negative transfer.15 6 conclusion .16 references.17 i acknowledgements i would like to thank all those who have given me their generous helps, commitment and enthusiasm, which have been the major driving force to complete the paper, thank all those who provided me with feedbacks through all kinds of ways, especially to my tutor who gave me many precious suggestions. i am grateful to their help. whats more i am deeply grateful to the authors of the materials and the books that i have chosen and selected for this paper. i intend to show every respect for intellectual property rights, and hope my pleading for the permission to use the related materials for my paper will receive kind and generous consideration. ii abstract the development of the economy promotes the world to become a multi- language world. under this situation, second language learning appears necessary. but in the process of learning，many people take their mother tongue as their basis of foreign language learning, as a result, the effect of mother tongue in foreign language leaning appears. in this paper, mother tongue transfer which mainly causes the convenience and difficulties for foreign language learners will be focused on. there are positive transfer and negative transfer which will separately promote and hinder the process of foreign language learning. the learners can make full use of positive transfer to accelerate their learning. as soon as an error is made, they can look at its nature and try to work out why it is made .errors can hold vital clues about the process of foreign language learning. it is rather like the pain that may tell the doctor more than all the parts that do not hurt. as long as talking about transfer, it is necessary to look at contrastive analysis hypothesis. the following parts will examine them in detail. key words: mother tongue; foreign language learning; transfer. iii 母语对外语学习的影响母语对外语学习的影响 摘要摘要 世界经济的发展使这个世界变成了一个多语世界，这种情况下第二语言 的学习就变得十分必要。 但是在第二语言学习过程中许多人都是以自己的 母语为基础的，这样母语对外语学习的影响就显而易见了。这篇论文主要讨 论一下母语迁移现象给外语学习者带来的便利和困难之处。母语迁移现在报 告正迁移和负迁移，它们分别促进和阻碍了外语学习的进程。我们要充分利 用母语的正迁移现象来加速我们的学习。同时当有错误发生的时候，我们能 够找到我们产生错误的原因，就像你去看医生一样。谈到语言迁移现象，我 们很有必要看一下对比分析假设，在下面的段落中会详细的介绍一下。 关键词关键词：母语; 外语学习; 语言迁移。 1 1 introduction how do the language of mother tongue affects foreign language study is one of the most important issues discussed by linguists and psychologists, for the students who have already mastered the basic phonetics, spelling, grammar, their study of this knowledge must be affected by that of their mother tongue unconsciously. at the same time, different ethnic groups of people have different modes of communication. so it is ordinary to see the phenomenon of transfer. the study of many researches proves that mother tongue and second language learning have close relationship with each other, and the study on mother tongue transfer have made great process constantly in every aspect. generally speaking, the study on mother tongue transfer overseas mainly concentrates on the discussion of the elements which affect mother tongue transfer. selinker(1983) divided transfer into positive transfer and negative transfer. looking at the effect of one habit on learning another is known in psychology as the study of transfer. two sorts of transfers are important to us. positive transfer is where the two habits share common aspects, such that knowing one will help with learning another, for example if you can ride a bike it will be very easy for you to ride a motorbike. negative transfer is also called interference is where the two habits share no common aspects. they are two aspects of contrastive analysis (ca). many linguistic and psychologists believe that by comparing native and target languages, they would find almost everything that they want to know. the study on mother tongue transfer home is based on the foreign materials, and the related articles are basically introduced and seldom applied to foreign language teaching. 2 2 the definition of transfer and related theory transfer, derived from the latin word “transferre”, means “to carry”, “to bear” or “to print, impress or otherwise copy (as a drawing or engraved design) from one surface to another” , (websters third new world international dictionary, 1986). so to speak, when we say “technology transfer”, we mean the transfer or carry-over of technology from one owner to another. transfer was first cited from psycholinguistic learning which was brought out by uriel-weinreich in 1953. later on many people did a lot of research on it, for example kasper and blum-kulka talk about in their book interlanguage pragmatics from the aspect of pragmatic transfer. transfer occurs has much to do with learners level. it has suggested that lower level learners are particularly prone to negative transfer. having fewer resources at their disposal in the target language, perhaps they rely heavily on their native language to help them in times of trouble. when they do not know a word or a structure, for example, they may simply fall back on their mother tongue equivalents and use them. psychological research on the transfer can be traced back to the 18th century in the form of training, by language training; people thought that speech can be automatically moved to the learning of other languages. besides, there is also contrastive analysis theory which is closely related to transfer theory. the early days of ca were heady ones. the early behaviorists claimed that the mother tongue has influence on the target language during second language learning. they even thought by comparing native and target language they would tell everything they want to know which came as strong ca. so they advocated the comparison between mother tongue and target language in order to learn about the differences and find out the learners difficulties. but strong ca has its 3 shortcomings which leads to the development of what wardhaugh(1970) calls the weak ca hypothesis. this is more reasonable in its claims. it says that ca may help us identify and explain some learners errors with any certainty in advance. at the same time by analyzing the differences between the two languages, he found the degree of differences is closely linked with that of the difficulties in learning. and he also believed the similar ingredients between mother tongue and a second language is easy for the learners, but the differences between them are difficult, this contrastive analysis hypothesis proposed by lado points out the influence of mother tongue transfer on the second language learning, and it can also predict the errors and difficulties that the learners are inclined to commit and encounter by means of analyzing and comparing mother tongue and target language. later on kelleman introduces marked theory to language learning, he believed that the composition of unmarked in the process of transfer will gradually stop; he also claimed unmarked components are inclined to transfer while the marked ones are not inclined to do so. the phenomenon that unmarked components are inclined to transfer exists in different levels of language and the study of students who have different cultural backgrounds. meanwhile, marked theory also help people make more sense of the language transfer phenomenon, and it can explain some phenomena that cant be explained by traditional comparative analysis hypothesis. 4 3 the promotion of positive transfer over foreign language learning though belonging to different language system, two languages more or less share some similar ingredients which will simplify foreign language learning, and the effect of this phenomenon is called positive transfer. so the learners should make full use of positive transfer to serve them. positive transfer promote the process of foreign language learning have the following reasons. languages have some common ingredients; take chinese and english for example, in chinese language system there are many letters share the same pronunciation with english letters, for example if you can pronounce p, b, t, and d in chinese it will not different for you to pronounce them in english. whats more, the pronunciations of some english letters are the same with some chinese characters which is very important for new learners. take chinese character “爱” for example it has the same pronunciation with the english word “i”. there are a lot of such cases between the two language systems. mother tongue is the basis of the foreign language learning. imagine a person begin to learn a foreign language, he may at lose at first, because he have nothing to rely on if he do not stretch his hands to his mother tongue. mother tongue is the only recourse access to him. the acquisition of new information takes the existing knowledge as its basis, so foreign language learning is not from anything but from your mother tongue. sometimes even you have learned a foreign language for a long time but when you meet some difficult points it is very necessary to offer backgrounds in chinese. mother tongue can promote comprehensible input. foreign language learning process is a process of information dealing and a mans information dealing 5 ability is unlimited. the success of this process, on one hand, depends on the features of the information itself; on the other hand rely much on your past experience. and your past experience refers to your mother tongue. in this area, krashen brings out i+1 theory, this theory argues that comprehensible input is the key and necessary condition of foreign language learning. without comprehensible input foreign language acquisition becomes impossible. the more the comprehensible input comes the faster the learners will learn. through large amount of work swain and lapkin found that students can finish their task successfully by way of using mother tongue. mother tongue can promote learners positive emotion. such emotion includes learning attitude, motivation, confidence and anxiety and the main problem is anxiety so the learners should erase anxiety. the learning of target language beyond learners level is the main cause of anxiety so its a common phenomenon that poor students if they continue to be poor for a long time, they will lose their confidence. so when the learners meet some difficult things in our foreign language learning process it is very important for us to use our mother tongue to explain. according to an investigation 88.7 percent learners regards that mother tongue can relax them when they are at lose. 6 4 the hinder of negative transfer over foreign language learning when talking about transfer we mainly refer to negative transfer. compared with positive transfer, negative transfer plays a more important role in the effect of foreign language learning. and this papers main point lies on this theme. in the process of foreign learning, learners inclined to use mother tongue even when they communicate in target language. they try to use phonetics, meaning, grammatical structure and culture to help them, and accordingly they are affected by their mother tongue before they know. negative transfer theory begin in the early 1950s and its typical advocator is robert lado who pointed out that the key point of foreign language learning is the comparison of the mother tongue and the target language, the more similarities there are the easier the target language will be, the more difference there are the more difficult the target language will be. american linguistist c.c. fries stated that (1945, contrastive and error analysis) the most effective teaching books are such books which on one hand give a scientific description of the target language on the other describe the mother tongue accordingly. in their eyes the errors appeared in the process of foreign language learning is all result from their mother tongue. the differences between two languages are what we should learn. in the late 1960s and early 1970s contrastive analysis theory (ca) was severely attacked for it didnt foresee the difficulties from its actual use but solely from the comparison of the two languages. so the expecting result is inevitablely incorrect, at the same time the early contrastive analysis theory (ca) attribute the errors of foreign learning totally to mother tongue is also wrong. selinker pointed out that there are also four reasons that cause this problem except mother tongue, there are 7 over-generalization, language training, learning strategy and communicating strategy. in fact, the learners must admit that foreign language learning is the combination of two languages, so the effect of mother tongue must be there. negative transfer affects foreign language learning in many aspects, phonetics, lexica, language. the following paper will examine it separately. 4.1 phonetic transfer there is a greater difference between english and chinese pronunciation, and the two languages belong to two completely different language system. so in the process of learning a foreign language, when judging the consistency or similarity between the two languages, learners tend to establish the equivalent relationship during learning. for example, they equate chinese /p/, /a/, /ao/ with english /p/, /a:/, /au/ accordingly, the reason for the recognition is that these pronunciation have similar sounds and it also lead to the phonetic transfer. he shan fen pointed out there are four differences in english-chinese phonetic structure, which can easily lead to a negative transfer on chinese speech: 1) because without english consonant cluster in chinese, there is always a yunmu between shengmu in chinese. when reading english, the learners get accustomed to adding a vowel between the consonants. for instance, fly /flai/ can be pronounced as /felai/. 2) english words often end with consonants, while the chinese words end mainly with a yunmu and n/ng, therefore when chinese students read english words they intend to add a vowel after consonants, for example: like /laik/ read as /laike/. 3) word in english phoneme /l/ often appear in the former, however, there is such phenomenon in chinese, when reading these words, chinese students will add a vowel before the back consonant such as milk /milk/ read as /milek/.4) when reading nasal blasting sound /tn/, /dn/, chinese students often add a vowel between two consonants, such as written /ritn/ read as /riten/. of course, the phonetic transfer involves not only word pronunciation but also other areas. china 8 is a country consists of 56 nationalities, all of whom have their own language, besides people from different area have different accents which will affect their foreign language learning process. in my class there are students from anhui and hunan. its very interesting to listen to their pronunciations, because they always pounce n as l and l as n. every time they pronounce chinese 奶奶 as 来来. so accordingly in the process of our learning english they made many such mistakes. they read night and light and light as night, little as nittle, even if you tell them many times, they still make such mistakes. in this example we can see phonetic transfer deeply affect foreign language learners. 4.2 lexical transfer during the process of foreign language learning, foreign language learners tend to mix the target language and their mother tongue together, so unconsciously they will produce a word that do not exist. for chinese learners, when they learn japanese, they tend to make suck mistakes, because there are many words are exactly the chinese words, but some are not the same. if they over-use our mother tongue to help them, such mistake is inevitable. ringbom (1978) reports on a major study of lexical transfer. he looks at how a large number of swedish and finnish students translate words (contextualized in sentence) into english. the transfer he finds often manifests itself in quite strange, even bizarre, ways. two examples: the finnish word for jam is hillo; at least one learner mixes the finnish and english word together to produce a non-existent word jillo .the finnish word for blush is punastua. this reminds one leaner of the english word punish, so this is used to translate punastua. swedish and english share many similarities, but finnish is very different. ringbom notices that learners seem to be aware of this fact. the swedes in his study seem to expect english words to be similar to swedish ones, and are much more confident in making guesses. (p.86) an example is the word dozen, which is fairly similar in 9 form to both swedes (dussin) and finnish (tusina) despite the similarities ,many more swedes than finns try to guess at the english word. many finns just leave it out. for chinese student we tend to equal the meaning of chinese words to english words. in fact they are not exactly the same, for example, in chinese we have 大伯，叔叔，姑父，姨夫，舅舅 and so on, but in english there is only one word uncle. and it is true if we look at this; in english we have thick fog, heavy rain, big house but in chinese the words thick, heavy, and big can be all used “大”. some interesting things are this: custom also affects this aspect. for example, dragon in the eyes of chinese people is the symbol of good but in the opinion of western word it is the symbol of the evil，which is quite different from us. so the learners should be care of this when we talk with westerners. in order to eliminate the misunderstanding some people suggest to translate our dragon as chinese dragon bu