The Effects of Language Transfer on Chinese English Learners’ Oral Learning and Teaching Strategies

Abstract

Native language transfer is divided into positive and negative transfer, which is an inevitable phenomenon in the process of second language acquisition. Positive transfer facilitates second language acquisition, while negative transfer can cause pragmatic errors and thus hinder foreign language learning. Undoubtedly, many Chinese and foreign experts and scholars have researched how mother tongue transfer affects foreign language learning and achieved specific results. However, most of their research has been devoted to solving the problem of the influence of mother tongue transfer on foreign language writing. In contrast, those explored from the perspective of spoken language have focused on vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatic errors, and the corpus used in such research generally comes from the spoken language corpus. Theories such as second language acquisition, error analysis, contrastive analysis, and mediational language have been the primary guiding theories for studying language transfer. Inspired by these theories and previous studies, this study uses quantitative research and qualitative research on native language transfer produced by the syntactic errors of spoken English exploration, aiming to find out what are the most common errors made by the students in the syntax of spoken English via and how to help the students to reduce the incidence of these errors. The study results show that negative native language transfer is more severe to students’ tenses in spoken English syntax. The findings also reveal that more contextualized practice focusing on communication rather than grammar and providing personalized feedback and guidance are the main ways to reduce the impact of negative native language transfer.