People nurtured in Western Culture tend to dissect things into parts and analyze their relationships. Nevertheless, people brought up in Chinese culture are likely to synthesize parts and examine the whole. The dissection contributes to the development of logical thinking by abstractive reasoning while the synthesis helps to think in terms of images and gain intuitive insight, which is a kind of perception.
These differences of modes of thinking influence characteristics of languages. For example: When a speech is made by an American, the audience can easily get the message by following the cohesive connectors signaling time relationships like“first”,“second”,“third”,“next”etc. and those signaling logical relationships such as “because(cause)”,“however(contrast)”,“actually(contradiction)”. But a Chinese writer would attach great importance to the unity and harmony of the whole piece, giving much attention to the correspondence between introduction and conclusion and the natural transition from one point to another, rather than the clear-cut division between different sections .
Westerners always evaluate or describe something very objectively just as it really is. But Chinese are used to using beautiful modifiers and singing high praise for something with some exaggerations. For example: When expressing the importance of knowledge, some Chinese students write like this “Knowledge is a streak of light in the darkness. It is a bright sun shining over the globe.” However, westerners only use some simple and common words to symbolize knowledge such as“building bricks”or“a key to unlock mysteries”.
1.2.3 Disadvantages of traditional teaching methods
In the traditional teaching, teachers often concentrate mainly on teaching grammar and vocabulary, while they neglect teaching practical usage of these vocabularies. That’s why students find their mind blank whenever they write although they have acquired a large vocabulary and learned a lot about English grammar. In many situations, they can just combine all the words together and get a sentence that doesn’t conform to the standard English. Besides, they only know the literal meanings of most of the words and are ignorant of the cultural connotation of them, which may cause their misusing of the words.
1.3 The classification of language transfer
Traditionally, the research of language transfer used to focus on the errors that learners make, and errors that occurred as a result of the “negative transfer”. However, the subsequent researchers have identified a number of other manifestations of transfer, two of which are frequently discussed.
1.3.1 Negative transfer
Negative transfer refers to the interference of mother tongue into L2 acquisition. Negative transfer of mother tongue can be found at all the levels of language structure. A speaker’s foreign accent in L2 learning is an evidence of negative transfer at the phonological level. Morphological negative transfer is common. For instance, under the influence of Chinese language, some students will say’ big rain’ rather than ‘heavy rain’. Negative transfer at syntactical level also exists, for example, in replying to the tag question: ‘This house isn’t large, is it?’ Influenced by Chinese language rules, many students will say: ‘Yes, it isn’t large. ’or ‘No, it is large.’ It is not hard to find evidence to show the negative transfer at discourse level. For example:
English teacher: Your English is very good.
Chinese student: No, no, my English is not good at all.
The Chinese student’s reply is grammatically correct, but it is not appropriate according to the communicative rules of English-speaking people. The error is due to the influence to Chinese communicative rules.
1.3.2 Positive transfer
Positive transer meansf any facilitating effects on acquisition due to the influence of cross-linguistic similarities. Odlin points out that the facilitative effects can only be observed when learners with different native languages are studied and learner comparisons are carried out⑷. Such comparisons often show that cross-linguistic similarities can produce positive transfer in several ways. Similarities between native language and target language vocabulary can reduce the time needed to develop good reading comprehension. Similarities between vowel systems can make the identification of vowel sound easier. Similarities between writing systems can give learners a fast start in reading and writing in target language. For example, Chinese learner of Japanese has enormous advantages over English learner because of the similarities of the Chinese and Japanese writing system. And similarities in syntactic structures can facilitate the acquisition of grammar: learners speaking a language with syntax similar to that of the target language tend to have less difficulty with articles, word order, and relative clause. It is generally recognized that L1 and L2 writers display basically similar patterns in composing, employing a recursive process during which they plan, write, rehearse, rescan, and revise again. For instance, one study claims that Chinese learner of English employ general composing strategies similar to those found among native English-speaking writers. Some researchers also claim that there is a culture-independent cognitive ability that L2 learner developed during their earlier education and transfer into their L2 writing; this ‘writing expertise’ is found to be positive related to qualities of discourse or ganization and content in L2 compositions. We are sure that more examples will be found to show that L1 promotes L2 acquisition.
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