英语论文网

语言迁移在英语学习中的重要性

Abstract

Language transfer is an important field of study in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). It occurs at almost all levels of language learning from phonetics, lexis and syntaxl to discourse. As Long and Richards put it in the preface of Odlin’s Language Transfer (1989): Language transfer has been a central issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and language teaching for at least a century. Learners’ interlanguage (IL) system reveals both their Native Language (NL) features and the features of the Target Language (TL), indicating an obvious interference from the learner’s NL into the TL. Researchers have made comprehensive studies on the nature of transfer and its role in second language acquisition. But so far much has been done on transfer at the structural or cross-linguistic level, and the nonstructural or cross- cultural factors influencing the learner’s second language performance, i.e., pragmatic transfer have received little attention. Pragmatic transfer refers to the influence of learners’ native language and culture on their IL pragmatic knowledge and performance (Kasper, G. & Blum-Kulka 1993). Lack or misuse of TL pragmatic knowledge (pragmalinguistic or socio-pragmatic) in TL situations may result in violations of TL cultural norms, and lead to pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication. However, efforts have been mainly focused on cross-cultural oral communication situations such as requests and apologies (Blum-Kulka, S., Olshtain, E., 1984), and refusals(Lu Jiawei & Zhang Xiaoli, 2009), etc, while second language learners’ pragmatic competence in writing, that is, learners’ ESL written communicative performance, has been largely ignored. Traditionally, pragmatic theory and principles are mainly used to analyze spoken corpora, but it may be appropriate to say that they can be equally applied to written language as well, because writing is a culture-embedded activity which is exactly what pragmatic study is aimed at. Therefore it is vital to balance our research attention to these two subfields.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how pragmatic transfer affects Chinese students’ ESL compositions, examine the various manifestations of transfer from the TL thought and cultural patterns into their English writing, and classify them. The corpus comes from the 42 English compositions written by the junior students majoring in World History at Shandong Normal University. With theories of pragmatics, English writing and contrastive rhetoric, and from a socio-cultural perspective, I first of all define the two types of transfer—linguistic/structural transfer and pragmatic transfer, classify the various pragmatic transfer cases into two major types—pragmalinguistic transfer and socio-pragmatic transfer, and then make a thorough analysis into the various manifestations of transfer at lexical, syntactical/grammatical, discourse and tone levels. Finally I outline some important implications and provide some suggestions for second language teaching and learning, particularly the instruction of ESL writing.
Limitations of the thesis are obvious. They are small size of data, singular academic background of the subjects and a static approach to the research. Nevertheless, What I hope is to draw more research attention to this field, and that studies in the future shall be dy