A Corpus-Based Study On Conceptual Transfer Of Prepositions In English Writings Of Middle School Students

Language transfer has attracted more and more attention in second language acquisition.Influenced by cognitive linguistics,Pavlenko(1998)proposed conceptual transfer,which has become a new direction in the research of language transfer.Through literature review,it is found that conceptual researches are diverse in foreign studies,but few studies have been conducted on the language output for Chinese EFL learners.Domestic studies mostly have stayed at the descriptive stage.Although some studies have explained the conceptual transfer from a cognitive perspective,they failed to fully analyze the underlying causes.Based on the “theoretical framework of conceptual transfer in English learning” and the self-built corpus,this study only focuses on the transfer of Chinese concepts in the use of English prepositions of junior high school students in English writing,not on the reverse transfer.Especially,it includes three research questions: 1)What are the types of conceptual transfer in the use of prepositions in English writings of middle school students? 2)What are the differences of conceptual transfer for middle school students at three proficiency levels in the use of prepositions in English writings? 3)What are the causes of conceptual transfer in the use of prepositions in English writingof middle school students?In order to answer above three research questions,this study collected the compositions to build corpora from the students with three different proficiency levels(junior three,senior one and senior two).The collection of corpora lasted four months,720 essays,totally more than80,000 words.Firstly,the prepositions in the corpus are retrieved by the Ant Conc,and the index is edited to form a new text.Secondly,these prepositions are observed and classified in a new text.This paper interprets the use of prepositions from the lexical and grammatical levels,and analyzes how they are influenced by Chinese concepts.Finally,SPSS(20.0)was used to compare the differences of conceptual transfer for students with different proficiency levels.The findings are as follows: 1.There are three types in conceptual transfer of prepositions for middle school students(positive transfer at the lexical level,negative transfer at the lexical level and negative transfer at the grammatical level).2.There are also differences in the conceptual transfer of prepositions among students at three levels.In terms of positive transfer at the lexical level,there are significant differences between low level and other two levels,while there is no significant difference between high level and medium level students.In terms of negative transfer at the lexical and grammatical level,there are significant differences between the high level and low level,while there is nosignificant difference between the medium level and other two groups.This shows that the conceptual system for L2 learners changes with the improvement of L2 proficiency.3.it is found that conceptual transfer is mainly caused by the similarities and differences of concepts at the lexical and grammatical levels.The reasons are analyzed with the supporting of image-schema theory.Finally,some suggestions are given to teachers and students,so as to help them understand the difficulties in learning English preposition,and thus to learn English effectively.