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Under the influence of globalization, English has attracted more people’s attention. Learning English has become a popular phenomenon in China; however, a series of problems eventually occur. For example, most students are able to pass various English written examination, while they have a lot of problems in oral English. In China, as a foreign language, English teaching does not have a proper environment. Except for transitory several quarters in class and limited textbooks, students have very little opportunity to speak English. In a poor language environment, students are not skilled in speaking English. In addition, the main purpose of learning English is for the test, so students are not interested in learning and speaking English.
Nowadays, people increasingly realize the importance of oral English. In Public English Testing, oral examination and written examination are equally important. Actually, mandarin and oral English have many similarities in pronunciation. Thus, it is not difficult for us to find that mandarin plays an important role in promoting oral English. The efficiency and effectiveness of English study have been affected directly or indirectly by language transfer, so it is also very helpful to know and make use of it during the course of English learning and study.
Language transfer originated from 1950s was influenced by psychology and linguistics. It occupied a prominent position in SLA theories in the 50s and 60s of the twenty century. Language transfer dominated the field of linguistics at that time, and became the theoretical foundation of Contrastive Analysis. Then, from the end of 60s to the 70s, many linguists demurred to language transfer due to the effect of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. Afterwards, transfer became a popular topic in the field of language teaching from 70s to 80s. It was regarded as an important learning strategy, and a complicated cognitive process which was affected and restrained by many factors. Researchers comprehensively studied the foundation of transfer in foreign language learning from perspectives of psychology, language and society.(Yue Peng 2013: 1)
The word ‘transfer’ is from psychology. It refers to the knowledge, skills and methods that learners have mastered having an influence on new knowledge and skills in learning process. In the process of learning English, transfer means the language and experience that we learnt before affecting the learning of new language. The foregoing language and experience includes native language and study experience of native language. If this effect is positive, we call it positive transfer; on the contrary, if it plays a negative role, it is called negative transfer or interference. In the study area of second language acquisition, linguists and psychologists found that the influences of native language to target language are as follows. When learners use the target language to communicate, they tend to use the pronunciation, semantics, grammar and cultural customs of their native language. If a foreign language structure has a corresponding structure in native language, there will be a positive transfer in study. In other words, the structure in native language directly transfers to foreign language. Conversely, if a foreign language structure doesn’t have a corresponding structure in native language or native language structure doesn’t have a corresponding structure in foreign language or the structure in two languages is different, there will be a negative transfer. The positive transfer of native language can promote the acquisition of second; however, the negative transfer will lead to language errors and the difficulty in study.
3. Research Questions and Hypotheses
There is such a phenomenon. Students who speak mandarin well, are also good at spoken English. (Li Jing, 49)However, students with accent are relatively poor in spoken English. For example, when people from Sichuan speak English, [məʊz] sounds like [ləʊz]. The northerners confound with ‘v’ and ‘w’ when they speak mandarin, so /v/ is mistakenly considered to be /w/ by most of the northerners. There must be a close relationship between mandarin and oral English. Is there a positive transfer of mandarin in oral English acquisition? What is the cause of this?