Analysis of The Negative Transfer in Chinese Middle School Students Acquisition of English in Lexical Aspect

Abstract

This paper mainly analyzes the negative transfer issues that Chinese middle school students generally have in their acquisition of English regarding lexical aspect. Data of the research is collected from the designed exercise completed by three middle school students with different English proficiency levels. Concerning all the lexical transfer errors that the students make, collocation and derivation are the two most common types. Regarding collocation, this paper argues that an English word with multiple Chinese equivalents leads to the use of wrong collocations in English. Regarding derivation, this paper finds that the changeable word form of different parts of speech in English causes the wrong use of the word form. In addition, several suggestions are offered to improve the negative transfer in the acquisition of English, which are using English-English dictionary, focusing on the language input, and making contrastive analysis.