The Negative Influence of Mother Tongue on Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition
---Through Chinese Students Learning English Experience
I. Definitions
Mother tongue means the language which a person has grown up speaking from early childhood. It has a great influence on the second language acquisition. As professor Robert Lado emphasized in his book Linguistics Across Culture, that in the environment of the second language acquisition, learners depend on their mother tongue and transfer the language form, meaning and the culture related with their mother tongue to the second language acquisition (Lado 1957). Then he came up with a very important term “language transfer”. In Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, “language …show more content…
Negative Influence of Mother Tongue on the Acquisition of Vocabulary
Then this paper will focus on the negative transfer of mother tongue that occurs when Chinese students learn English vocabulary. As a famous educator Jeremy Harmer said, if we take structure as bones of language, then vocabulary is the most important organ (153). So we can see the great significance of vocabulary in learning a second language. Three parts will be discussed: meaning, collocation and word …show more content…
Firstly, mother tongue may have negative influence on the understanding of the direct meaning of a single word or phase. For example, “look” means “看”, “out” means “向外”, so many young learners take “look out” as “向外看”. What’s more, many learners translate “计划生育”, which should be “one-child policy”, into “Plan Birth”(苑 102-3). Secondly, some cultural difference behind the words also affect people’s acquisition of new words. For instance, the word “dog” has positive meanings in English, it can be seen in phases and slang like “luck dog” and “love me, love my dog”. However, Chinese phases like “狗腿子” or “ 狗头军师” shows Chinese people believe the word “dog” has very negative meaning (李玲芳). 98Thirdly, there are some synonyms in both languages, they have similar meaning but have different level of formality and different collocation. For synonyms with different level of formality, there is an obvious example: in English, we call our father: “male parent”, “father”, “dad” or “daddy”; in Chinese, we call them “父亲”, “爸爸”, “爸”, “爹”. Some times, English speakers will call their father “old man”, but Chinese people won’t call their father “老头”. And for synonyms with different collocation, in English we have words like “say”, “tell”,
---Through Chinese Students Learning English Experience
I. Definitions
Mother tongue means the language which a person has grown up speaking from early childhood. It has a great influence on the second language acquisition. As professor Robert Lado emphasized in his book Linguistics Across Culture, that in the environment of the second language acquisition, learners depend on their mother tongue and transfer the language form, meaning and the culture related with their mother tongue to the second language acquisition (Lado 1957). Then he came up with a very important term “language transfer”. In Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, “language …show more content…
Negative Influence of Mother Tongue on the Acquisition of Vocabulary
Then this paper will focus on the negative transfer of mother tongue that occurs when Chinese students learn English vocabulary. As a famous educator Jeremy Harmer said, if we take structure as bones of language, then vocabulary is the most important organ (153). So we can see the great significance of vocabulary in learning a second language. Three parts will be discussed: meaning, collocation and word …show more content…
Firstly, mother tongue may have negative influence on the understanding of the direct meaning of a single word or phase. For example, “look” means “看”, “out” means “向外”, so many young learners take “look out” as “向外看”. What’s more, many learners translate “计划生育”, which should be “one-child policy”, into “Plan Birth”(苑 102-3). Secondly, some cultural difference behind the words also affect people’s acquisition of new words. For instance, the word “dog” has positive meanings in English, it can be seen in phases and slang like “luck dog” and “love me, love my dog”. However, Chinese phases like “狗腿子” or “ 狗头军师” shows Chinese people believe the word “dog” has very negative meaning (李玲芳). 98Thirdly, there are some synonyms in both languages, they have similar meaning but have different level of formality and different collocation. For synonyms with different level of formality, there is an obvious example: in English, we call our father: “male parent”, “father”, “dad” or “daddy”; in Chinese, we call them “父亲”, “爸爸”, “爸”, “爹”. Some times, English speakers will call their father “old man”, but Chinese people won’t call their father “老头”. And for synonyms with different collocation, in English we have words like “say”, “tell”,