Addressing Negative First Language Transfer by Raising Students’ Awareness

Abstract

It is commonly believed that few second language learners are able to use the target language without any interference from their native language. Many learners of English in China are relying on Chinese to organise their ideas when they write in English. This is problematic because these two languages have several different features. For example, Chinese is topic prominent whereas English is subject prominent; Chinese does not have tense inflections of verbs while that is a common feature of English. In addition, what can be easily expressed in one simple sentence in Chinese might need a compound or complex English sentence, or even a group of English sentences to convey a clear meaning, vice versa. To address the problem, this paper comparatively analyzed the linguistic features of a well written argument in Chinese and its English translation (See Appendix) using functional discourse grammar approach, and proposed some feasible solutions, which could give English language learners and teachers a new perspective of approaching the target language.