On Transfer Of Grammatical Metaphor In Chinese ESL Students' Writings

In all the aspects of college English learning, writing is the students'weakness. For Chinese college students, learning to write in English is quite different from learning to write in Chinese, for they have commanded their native language and are used to writing in Chinese in the course of learning to write in English. Many linguists put native language interference on the top when listing various reasons that cause errors in students'writing. As the core of the study of language transfer, the influence of the mother tongue in second language acquisition has long been a controversial topic with many problems remaining unsolved. The present writer has tried to conduct a pilot investigation with a breakthrough of the influence of the mother tongue on the process and result of L2 production. The study is set to examine the influence of the mother tongue on grammatical metaphor of the college students.It is well-known that the essential techniques of writing are mainly embodied in the ability of sentence arrangement and discourse organization."Grammatical Metaphor is a manifestation of high level during the process of language acquisition"(熊学亮,刘东虹,2005). College students mostly already have high level of cognition and language, so will they transfer the acquired experience-organizing manner to the target language and produce grammatical metaphor? To this end, the following issues are addressed:Does grammatical metaphor transfer exist? If exist, what kind of role does mother tongue play in L2 writing, being positive or negative? And which type occupies more proportion?How many and which kinds of grammatical metaphor are often used?Do learners who have high degree of grammatical metaphor of native language also hold high level of grammatical metaphor of the target language? And what is the real relationship between those two?What is the regular pattern of grammatical metaphor developments from the freshmen to the senior? Is it from the congruent form to the metaphorical form?The participants involved in this study were 64 students (from 4 grades, 16 for each) from Foreign Language and Literature Department of China University of Petroleum. Think aloud method was adopted to record the process of the argumentation writing of the subjects to examine the influence of the mother tongue on L2 production. According to the PDP (Parallel Distributed Processing) theory in cognitive science, human brain has the instinctive feature of searching for and establishing relationship among things. Moreover, mother tongue influence is a process rather than a result and it is not the mere interference or dependence on the L1 (俞理明,2004). It is hoped that the present research can make some contributions, if any, to the theoretical development of the corresponding field and give some inspiration to the language teachers in making the most of the mother tongue influence with an appropriate and objective attitude toward it rather than the mere ignorance of it. Meanwhile, they should guide the learners to minimize the negative influence of the mother tongue in L2 learning.The present writer maintains that more attention should be concentrated on the specific environment of the English learners in China. The advanced theories and research methods in SLA of the western countries could be adopted by the Chinese researchers and more empirical investigations and quantitative data are still demanding in this field. Based on the achievements of the previous investigators, the present writer will be very happy if her efforts can make the least bit of contributions in shedding light on the further researches.The thesis consists of six parts. The first part is the introduction which introduces the background, the objective and the framework of the present study.The second part is Chapter One which offers the relevant studies which surveys the detailed overview of language transfer abroad and in China on the thesis. This chapter begins with the definitions and terminologies related to the thesis, after a brief review of the previous studies under different frameworks presented by different researchers in this field, a review of the studies of mother tongue influence focusing on the results and the process of L2 production is given.Chapter Two is the theoretical basis of the study which consists of theory of transfer, grammatical metaphor and error analysis.Chapter Three is the design of the present study, including subjects, instruments, methodology and procedures. 64 English majors from first-year to fourth-year at China University of Petroleum are involved.Chapter Four mainly discusses the analysis and results of the statistical data. The major results of the study reveal that the transfer of grammatical metaphor does exist. And the positive aspects play a more important part than the negative ones. And the developing regularity of grammatical metaphor in SLA is from the congruent form to the metaphorical form.The last part is the conclusion which puts forward some reasonable suggestions on overcoming native language interference in Chinese ESL students'writing. It points out English writing teaching is a kind of cultural teaching. So instructors should enhance students'cross-cultural awareness, and help them improve their writing ability. And teachers should pay more attention to the errors caused by the negative transfer.