Negative Transfer Negative transfer is one branch of Language transfer.In order to understand negative transfer you need to know what is language transfer.Definition of Language transfer Transfer is the influence resulting from the similarities and differences betwween the target language and any other language that has been previously acquired (and perhaps imperfectly acquired).
---Odlin (1989) The influence of a person\'s knowledge of one language on that person\'s knowledge or use of another language.---Jarvis, Pavlenko (2008) Negative Transfer Negative transfer is a behavioral psychologyterm that refers to the interference of the previous knowledge with new learning.It relates to the experience with one set of events could hurt performance on related tasks.It also describes the pattern of error in animal learning and behavior.It occurs when a learned, previously adaptive response to one stimulus interferes with the acquisition of an adaptive response to a novel stimulus that is similar to the first.There are four manifestations of the Negative Transfer in English Learning.First, Negative transfer in pronunciation When people hear a speaker with a “foreign accent”, they often try to gue the speaker’s background.Often the clue seems to be how the individual talks.In such cases, questions put to the speaker such as “Are you German?” “Are you Spanish?” or “Are you Asian?” suggest an intuition about the nature of language, an awarene, however unconscious, that the native language of a speaker can somehow cause the individual to sound “foreign” in speaking another language.The detection of foreign accents is one example of the awarene that people often have of language transfer in pronunciation.Example: Chinese learners’ performances on the sound of /æ/ are not quite satisfying, for the phoneme is often replaced by [e], a sound that is close to Chinese [ai].Second, Negative transfer in vocabulary A fundamental iue in the study of semantic transfer is the relation between language and thought.Expreions such as “learning to think in English” reflect a common belief that learning a particular language requires adopting a worldview which, to some extent, is unique to that language.When Chinese learners start learning English, they have been equipped with the deep-rooted Chinese way of thinking and their mother tongue inevitably influences their learning, especially the learning of vocabulary.Example: “It was quite warm when I got here, but the climate suddenly changed.” “Climate” refers to the average weather conditions at a particular place over a period of years, but in this sentence, the change means the particular condition at a certain time, so “weather” is the correct choice.Third, Negative transfer in grammer There are often grammatical restrictions found in one language but not in another and such restrictions can occasion difficulty.
A French-speaking student may make a sentence like this: At sixty-five years old they must retire themselves because this is a rule of society.While the form “retire” reflects a true French-English cognate, the French lexical item has a grammatical restriction that the ESL student applied erroneously to the English form- the use of the reflexive pronoun is neceary in French, whereas the use of the English reflexive themselves is not grammatical in the context of the sentence.The last, Negative transfer in culture
Negative transfer in culture refers to the cultural interference caused by cultural differences, which shows that people subconsciously use their cultural norms and values not only to guide their behaviors and thoughts but also to judge others’ behaviors and thoughts.Negative transfer in culture often results in communicative difficulties, misunderstandings and even hatred.When learners violate norms of conversation in the target language, the violations are potentially much more serious than syntactic or pronunciation errors since such violations can affect what is often termed “the presentation of self.” Negative cultural transfer occurs in all procees of intercultural communication and foreign language learning and is of great significance in both fields.
