3 Pragmatic transfer of native language on Chinese students’ English compositions
“An error can be defined as a deviation from the norms of the target language”[7]. It takes place as a result of lack of knowledge. It represents a lack of linguistic competence. By means of error analysis, teachers are likely to make clear how negative transfer of learners’ native language actually happens in English learning. In this chapter, the author intends to describe errors in students’ writing, analyzes their causes and types so as to throw some light on what strategies or procedures should be employed in teaching students to write in English correctly and effectively.
3.1 Lexical level transfer
Since English and Chinese belong to different writing systems, transfer does not occur in word forms. Yet Chinese students frequently transfer the meaning of word or phrases, as illustrated in the following sentences:
(1) He teaches me how to do an honest man.
(2) That book had been borrowed out.
(3) Smoking cigarettes will do harm to our body.
(4) After 4 years, they graduated from the university.
(5) Some natural resources such as oil and coal will be used up after 50 years.
(6) Just open the TV set, you can know everything and won’t have to go out of the door.
(7) TV can widen our eyes.
In the above cases, transfer occurs in almost all the word classes, which rang from noun phrases to verb phrases, adverbs, prepositions, and so on. For example, “do” appears in the phrase “do an honest man” (be an honest man); “out” is used in the expression “borrow out” (borrow). In Chinese, “hou”(后) is widely used to express the meaning such as direction, sequence, whereas different expressions are employed on different occasions in English, take sentence (4) and (5) for example, instead of “after 4 years”, the adverb “later” should be used to express the past time. In contrast, if something will take place in the future, “in” is the appropriate word to express the time, so “after 50 years” should be substituted for “in 50 years”. The students tend to equate English word “after” with Chinese “hou” on all occasions, yet the fact is that the two words are equivalent in some cases except when each of the two words has its own specific collocations in the two languages respectively. Violation of collocation rules by language learners will lead to misunderstanding or even jokes, as in the case of expressing “wo men yao ti chang wu jiang si mei” (我们要提倡五讲四美), some Chinese students translate it as “We should advocate five talks and four beauties”. “Beauty” can be used as a countable noun to refer to pretty women, no wonder the foreigners would ask, “Who are the four beauties?” The students failed to use the appropriate forms of the expressions by resorting to their native language knowledge. Selinker has referred to such phenomena as “a communicative strategy” frequently used in learners’ interlanguage production, which falls into the area of cognitive research[8]. The expressions that had been produced by the students are intuitively believed to be translation equivalent to their Chinese counterparts, and little attention had been paid to the phrases to whether they were appropriate or not.
Based on the above analysis, we can observe that the lexical transfer that occurs in Chinese EFL writing is basically semantic transfer in that these learners are constantly forming hypothesis of semantic equivalents between English and Chinese words. That is to say, Chinese EFL learners tend to make word-for-word translation in their writing, thus leading to transfer errors.
3.2 Syntactic level transfer
Transfer at sentential level may appear at the sentence structure. For example, in Chinese, several verbs can be used coordinately in one sentence, while only one primary verb is allowed to appear in an English sentence, other verbs being non-predicate verbs. Chinese students usually make such sentences as in the following:
(8) People think go to the movie will cost a lot of money.
People think that going to the movie will cost a lot of money.
(9) There are many people take part in sports now.
There are many people who take part in sports now.
(10) Now people go abroad is not easy.
It is not easy for people to go abroad now.
Another structural error which is typical in EFL writing by Chinese students is that in Chinese sentences without subjects can be accepted, because the reader may know the subject in context, for instance, “与电影不同,电视可以一直看,无需再花额外的钱”, while in English this is not permitted, not recognizing the rule, the above sentence may be written in English like this by some Chinese students, “Unlike the movie, TV shows on continuously, and doesn’t need to pay any extra money.”
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