Chinese to English Lexical Transfer Errors in the Writing of Rural Senior High School Students

Abstract

The influence of first language (L1) has been widely recognized as a crucial factor in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Language transfer is a typical phenomenon originating from this impact of L1. Many studies have tried to explore the influence of learners’ L1 on their SLA. This paper reports a study conducted at a rural senior high school in eastern China. Based on the lexical transfer taxonomy proposed by Dodigovic et al (2015), this research attempted to at first identify examples of lexical transfer from Chinese to English caused by (1) Chinese polysemes, (2) Chinese collocations, and (3) multiword units (MWUs) yielded from learners writing. Subsequently, the patterns of and underlying reasons for lexical transfer were traced. 115 pieces of students writing were examined for error collection, and some typical examples from which were further analyzed to show how negative lexical transfer occurs. The results suggest that a great proportion of errors were caused by Chinese polysemes. The significant difference between the lexical specificity of Chinese and English as well as the word-for-word semantic equivalent assumption of L2 learners were found to be important reasons for negative lexical transfer. Pedagogical implications such adopting a wider range of semantization strategies and preventing learners from taking word-for-word relation between L1 and L2 for granted were drawn from the discussion.