The Effects of Mandarin Chinese and Czech Negative Transfers on English Language Acquisition

Abstract

English has become the most studied second language around the world. Regardless of nationality, speakers of another native language other than English face challenges in acquiring English due to their fixed linguistic habits. This is a phenomenon called negative transfer. Mandarin and Czech are completely unrelated in terms of language family; thus, they can be used in this study to prove that the interference of the mother tongue with English happens inevitably and usually shares common areas of negative transfers. Since the author is a native speaker of Mandarin and Czech, her knowledge of the lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactic characteristics of these languages is used to demonstrate why native speakers of these two languages are prone to making specific English mistakes. At the same time, it relies heavily on first-hand accounts of common English errors gathered by other researchers to improve the studys dependability. The finding of this study argues that the negative transfer occurs because Mandarin and Czech lack the corresponding linguistic qualities of English. Native speakers of these two languages frequently struggle to remember English collocations, non-existent phonemes cannot be accurately pronounced, and similarly incompatible English tenses are used with errors. The absence of articles and the tendency for random word order also cause them to frequently go wrong in English usage. This research can be used as a resource for Chinese and Czech English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers to improve the quality of their classes.