A Study on Chinese and English Transfer in French Writing of L3 French Language Beginners

Abstract

In order to investigate the language transfer existing in the field of third language acquisition, and to provide effective strategies of learning two or more languages, this research, based on theories related to the third language acquisition and error analysis, collected 32 French compositions written by English majors’ undergraduates as a corpus, analyzed errors in those compositions, and further discussed the negative transfer of Chinese and English in their French learning. Eight types of errors from the lexical and syntactic perspectives were identified in the research findings. What is more, the negative transfer of English and Chinese appeared at both lexical and syntactic level, and the negative transfer of English is more than Chinese. “lexical errors” occupied more than “syntactic errors” in the transfer of English, while syntactic errors existed more frequently than lexical errors in the transfer of Chinese. There are three main reasons for results of transfers: language distance, language exposure, and language frequency, which provide effective strategies for third language acquisition.