A Review of Chinese Transfer on English Vocabulary Learning

Abstract

There are various specific areas of research under the topic of second language acquisition. Among all of them, vocabulary is supposed to be the most basic and important one because people are not able to speak a language without acquiring a large amount of vocabulary. In addition, it is inevitable for second language learners to learn new vocabulary with the help of their mother tongue. In other words, learners tend to apply language transfer consciously or unconsciously. So, this paper will take Chinese as the first language and English as the second language to review and analyze the Chinese transfer on English vocabulary learning. The aim and meaning of this paper are to help Chinese learners to effectually acquire plenty of English vocabulary. According to the research results, the positive transfer mainly happens in the perspective of word formation, while the negative one takes place in word meanings, misuse of countable and uncountable nouns, literal translation of words and collocations. Suggestions will be given to teachers in order to better instruct students to overcome the negative transfer. For example, they can conduct the comparative analysis, emphasize the language input and choose the appropriate teaching language.