Positive Transfer of Third Language Acquisition in English and French Sentence Patterns

Abstract

Language takes sentences as the basic unit and sentence structures in different languages have their own characteristics. At present, with the in-depth development of economic globalization and the rapid enhancement of the demand for cross language communication, there are more and more trilingual users. Therefore, third language acquisition, as an emerging field of international and domestic research in recent years, has attracted extensive attention. As is known to all, the two languages, English and French, are closely related but different. Hence, in the process of learning French as a second foreign language, the positive and negative transfer of English to French is inevitable. Under the framework of third language acquisition and based on language transfer theory, this paper analyzes the positive transfer of sentence structure in the process of third language acquisition through the comparative analysis of four special sentence patterns in English and French, which is helpful for English majors to learn French as a second foreign language more concisely and efficiently.