Studies on the Backward Transfer of Interlanguage Syntactic Structure—Taking Temporal Adverbial Clause as an Example

Abstract

The research focuses on the language transfer in L2 and L1 environment. The paper explores the language backward transfer from L2 (English) to L1 (Chinese) for mainland Chinese students in Australia as well as in China. With long time scholars concentrated on the forward transfer from L1 to L2 and profited a lot. However, there is some evidence reflected that backward transfer from L2 to L1 may take place in L2 and L1 environment, even in some academic occasion, L1 syntactic rules are losing. In this study, participants are mainland Chinese undergraduates from University of Newcastle and Hei Longjiang Bayi Agricultural University to complete translation and writing tasks. The aim of the paper is to investigate whether the backward transfer occurs in sentence translation and discourse level and the relationship between the backward transfer and L2 proficiency. The expected results are that backward transfer can happen both in L2 and L1 environment and the higher L2 proficiency can decrease backward transfer. In view of this, the research can reflect the complexity of language backward transfer and the relationship with L2 proficiency.