Reverse Negative Transfer At The Syntactic Level From English As L3 To Chinese As L2 Of Korean-Chinese Students

Language transfer has been a central issue in second language acquisition（SLA）;however,with the deepening study of this field and the development of economic globalization,language transfer has become a new focus and hot issue in the third language acquisition（TLA）.Multilinguals are the people who can speak three or more languages;since language study is a dynamic process,transfer could occur between the languages.As the result,through the third language learning process,three languages could influence each other from both positive and negative aspects.China is a united multi-ethnic country with the Han and fifty-five ethnic groups.Korean ethnic group is one of ethnic group that students are learning three languages;however,L3（English）learning may have negative transfer to L2（Chinese）at the syntactic level,which could hinder the study of L2 and L3.Furthermore,few studies about reverse negative transfer can be found in TLA field.As a result,this research hopes to contribute a little to this under-explored area in the domestic TLA field.This study combines the error analysis and the contrastive analysis to explore the following questions:（1）Does the reverse negative transfer from English（L3）to Chinese（L2）exist at the syntactic level?If it does exist,what are the main types of syntactic transfer errors?（2）What are the differences of negative transfer at the syntactic level between students from different English（L3）learning lengths?This research selects 60 Korean-Chinese English major undergraduates as the subjects（30 freshmen and seniors respectively）.The research instrument includes questionnaire and sentence test.Through the data analysis,the major findings are summarized as follows:（1）The reverse negative transfer from English（L3）to Chinese（L2）exists at the syntactic level,and the types of syntactic transfer errors are attributives,passive structure,overused pronouns,word order and clause sequences.（2）The longer English（L3）learning duration,the more significant backward negative influence on Chinese（L2）syntax.Based on the results,several suggestions are put forward.For teachers,they should guide the positive transfer as much as possible,and they can also reduce the negative transfer from English to Chinese syntax through the comparison between two languages.Moreover,they also should better improve their Chinese and English abilities in order to provide more effective instructions for students.For students,they should also notice and pay attention to the similarities and differences between English and Chinese by themselves,and they could do syntax training by writing diaries in Chinese and English.