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f learning new skills the existing knowledge or skillscan influence the acquisition of new skills. Discussion of “transfer” in linguisticsbegan with the linguists’ awareness of cross-linguistic influences in 1940s and 1950s.Since 1950s Language Transfer was applied in the field of language teaching formore than half a century and it is the important research topic in the field oflinguistics for a long time, Second Language Acquisition and language teaching.There are various definitions of Language Transfer. One of them is Odlin’s (Odlin,1989) working definition. He summarizes the problems of definition “transfer is notsimply a consequence of habit formation; transfer is not simply interference; transferis not simply a falling back on the native language; transfer is not always nativelanguage influence” (1989: 25-27) and defines that “transfer is the influenceresulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any otherlanguage that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired” (1989: 27).Odlin (1989) classifies Language Transfer into positive transfer and negativetransfer, and there are four types in negative transfer: underproduction,overproduction, production errors and misinterpretation. In terms of productionerrors, he claims that “in speech and writing there are three types of errors especiallylikely to arise from similarities and differences in the native and target languages: (1)substitutions, (2) calques, and alterations of structures” (1989: 37).
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2.2 Studies on Language Transfer and Contrastive Analysis in China
The researches of Language Transfer and Contrastive Analysis in China beginnot as early as abroad. Gui Shicun (1985) considers the influence of native languageis inevitable in the process of foreign language learning and influences occur whenthere are some similarities and differences between native language and the targetlanguage. Celebrated linguistics in China, Dai Weidong and Shu Dingfang (1994)discover that language learners inevitably used the mode of thinking and languagestructure of their native language in foreign language and the dependence on nativelanguage depends on the difficult level of the problem.The first one who proposes the Contrastive Analysis Theory in China tocompare two languages is Lv Shuxiang (1977), a celebrated linguist in China, whoonce made a speech at Beijing and Culture University named Study Grammar byComparing. He also states that if we do not help the learner to compare, the learnerhimself would compare subconsciously, which is an analogy. After then, many worksof Contrastive Analysis emerge in China. A celebrated scholar in our country namedWang Zongyan (1983), has a penetrating discussion about Contrastive Analysis. Asfor what is Contrastive Analysis, he points out the meaning of it can be derived fromits name. It is the comparison of two or more languages and sometimes someonecalls it as Contrastive Linguistics. He considers it is both a new and an old subject,both profound and normal and both many scholars do research on and many suspectof. It is new because it becomes popular in the recent two decades and it is oldbecause it comes into being with the emergence of translation. It is profound becausesomeone especially scholar in Transformational Grammar makes it more and morecomplex and normal because every new learner compares the similarities anddifferences between the native language and the target languag