scholarly journals Negative Transfer in Lithuanian Students’ Writing in English

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Aurelija Daukšaitė

Summary This research intends to find out whether Lithuanians studying English as a foreign language make certain mistakes because of the influence of their native language. It focuses on negative transfer in writing in English and is qualitative rather than quantitative. The article discusses the errors and illustrates them with examples that come from a corpus for which the data was obtained from 34 Moodle forum posts written by English B2 students, native speakers of Lithuanian who were in year one or year two of their studies in various study programmes but also studied English at Vytautas Magnus University as an obligatory subject. The students participated in this forum in October 2018 and reflected on the week of presentations they had recently had: they were asked to write what they liked or did not like in the presentations their colleagues had given in class, what went well and what did not, what they should improve in the future, etc. This study identified the types of errors (based on Camilleri, 2004) that occurred most frequently and their source (based on Camilleri, 2004; Brogan & Son, 2015). Most frequently the students made errors in the cases where there was a specific grammatical category in English, but it was non-existent in Lithuanian, while sometimes the source of errors was literal translation from the native language. The error analysis shows that in the English classroom specific attention should be given to the verb forms “is” and “are”, “was” and “were”, “has” and “have”, articles, collocations, tense agreement, quantifiers, the sentence structure of the English language and the importance of word meanings.

English Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reiko Takahashi

Due to its rise as a global means of communication, the English language has been increasingly used by and between non-native speakers (henceforth NNSs), leading to a growing interest in what has come to be known as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in English language teaching (ELT). As noted by Jenkins (2006: 159), ‘many of those who start out thinking they are learning English as a foreign language end up using it as a lingua franca’. This suggests that ELT materials need to be developed in ways that correspond with the emerging needs of such language learners. However, ‘the prevailing orientation in […] ELT materials still remains undoubtedly towards ENL [English as a Native Language]’ (Jenkins, 2012: 487). It is not yet clear how well ELF perspectives have been integrated into teaching materials to date.


Multilingua ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jette G. Hansen Edwards

AbstractThe study employs a case study approach to examine the impact of educational backgrounds on nine Hong Kong tertiary students’ English and Cantonese language practices and identifications as native speakers of English and Cantonese. The study employed both survey and interview data to probe the participants’ English and Cantonese language use at home, school, and with peers/friends. Leung, Harris, and Rampton’s (1997, The idealized native speaker, reified ethnicities, and classroom realities.TESOL Quarterly 31(3). 543–560) framework of language affiliation, language expertise, and inheritance was used to examine the construction of a native language identity in a multilingual setting. The study found that educational background – and particularly international school experience in contrast to local government school education – had an impact on the participants’ English language usage at home and with peers, and also affected their language expertise in Cantonese. English language use at school also impacted their identifications as native speakers of both Cantonese and English, with Cantonese being viewed largely as native language based on inheritance while English was being defined as native based on their language expertise, affiliation and use, particularly in contrast to their expertise in, affiliation with, and use of Cantonese.


Author(s):  
Anna Abryutina ◽  
Anna Ponomareva

The growing popularity of contrastive phonology as a branch of linguis-tics is seen now, in particular, due to the spread of bilingualism and multilin-gualism. Globalization involves the ability to speak several languages, in the study of which the phonetic level is primarily considered. The purpose of this work is to examine and describe the most likely consequences arising from in-terference in the articulation of vowel sounds in the English-language speech of Germans who study English as a foreign language. The article deals with monophthongs, diphthongs, and triphthongs, dis-cusses possible variations in the articulation of sounds, as well as the processes of reduction, elision, and substitution. Descriptive and comparative methods are the leading ones in the work, however, the instrumental method is also used to determine deviations from the norm and the nature of changes in articulation. The paper identifies a number of trends in the articulation of English sounds by Germans and reveals the reasons of the main difficulties which stu-dents face while studying phonetic norms of RP and speaking German as their native language, i.e. the qualitative and quantitative mismatch of allophones. The achievement of this goal testifies to the theoretical significance of this work, namely, the possibility of further detailed research in the field of sociophonetics and phonostylistics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 96-104
Author(s):  
Samar Alharbi

English language considers a global language spoken by a majority of people around the world. It is a language used mainly for communication, trades and study purposes. This widespread of English language being wildly spoken lead to different varieties of English as a lingua franca (ELF) means that non native speakers of English still be able to communicate with each other. Using ELF as a legitimate variety of English in language classrooms is questioned by some researchers. This paper will provide an overview of the concept of ELF. It will also present implications and limitations of using ELF in Saudi English as foreign language classrooms.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Priya K. Nair

In India acquisition of English language is imperative if one wants to sell oneself in the increasingly competitive job market. With a booming population the nation is filled with educated, technologically literate youth. English is not merely a foreign language in India. As India is separated by a plethora of languages knowledge of English is imperative. As the teachers in India are not native speakers of English the language they teach is not free from errors. The articulation is quite problematic as the mother tongue influence is quite pronounced. Technology helps to reduce these errors. Movies as a tool can enhance the listening and speaking skills of our students. It is quite boring to work with disembodied voices and the recorded conversations available in language labs do not sustain the learner’s interest. However learners are often forced to listen to recorded conversations of people they never see, the conversation is often stilted and contemporary idiom is hardly used. However, a completely new dimension to aural practice can be added in the classroom by using movies. <br /><p><strong> </strong></p>


For a long time, ELT (‘English language teaching’) scholars and practitioners have used terms like ‘ESL’ (‘English as a second language’) and ‘EFL’ (‘English as a foreign language’) unquestioningly to describe the English used by people outside the so-called ENL (‘English as a native language’) circle. For example, ELT practitioners may conveniently refer to students from places like China, Vietnam and Thailand as EFL students. Interestingly, we find counterparts of such terms in ‘World Englishes’ studies; Braj Kachru’s ‘Inner Circle English’, ‘Outer Circle English’ and ‘Expanding Circle English’ essentially refer to ENL ESL and EFL respectively. Despite the popularity of such terms in scholarly circles, the problems associated with their use have not often been explored in depth. Nevertheless, some authors have described such problems. For example, commenting on the distinction between ESL and EFL, Nayar (1997, p. 10) states, “a great deal of referential fuzziness within the two and denotative overlap between the two are making the terminological distinctions unclear, impractical, and ineffective or, worse still, in some cases inauspicious and irrelevant.” This special issue aims to further examine the use and relevance of these terms.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-209
Author(s):  
Eva Ogiermann ◽  
Spyridoula Bella

Abstract The present study examines request perspective, the least researched form of mitigation in requesting, while focusing on a type of request characterized by a strong preference for speaker perspective in English and for hearer perspective in most other languages researched to date. It examines requests produced by 900 speakers from nine different (inter)language groups: five groups of native speakers (English, German, Greek, Polish and Russian) and four groups of advanced learners of English as a foreign language (German, Greek, Polish and Russian L1s). While our learners used more conventionally indirect forms than did the native speakers of the respective L1s, showing awareness of this English pragmatic norm, they retained a preference for the hearer perspective. These results suggest reliance on pragmatic universals as an alternative explanation to pragmatic transfer, also illustrating the need to address less salient pragmatic features in English language teaching.


Fluminensia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Mirjana Matea Kovač

This paper aims at investigating the differences regarding speech rate between the Croatian (L1) and the English language (L2). The selected tasks include descriptions of dynamic entities which require careful planning and a chronological sequence of speech acts in real time, as well as the description of static spatial arrangements and their relations. The speech tasks were first performed in the native language, followed by the performance of the same tasks in the foreign language. A significantly faster speech rate was hypothesized in the foreign language condition for each investigated speech task due to the unautomated nature of L2 speech production mechanisms. The obtained results point to the conclusion that the speech rate is significantly slower in L2 in narrative tasks due to the conceptual complexity of the task. However, no significant differences in the speech rate were found between the two languages in the case of highly structured tasks with shorter duration, or in the case of repeated tasks. Due to the fact that the tasks have already been performed in the native language, the processing demands on the level of conceptualization decrease, freeing up the attentional resources, which, in turn, assist the formulation and articulation stage by reducing the processing pressure. Also, the fact that no significant differences were found might be explained by the existence of strong associative links between L1 and L2, as well as by the occurrence of highly frequent words which can be easily retrieved from the mental lexicon, especially if they have previously been activated in the native language. Introduction of new topics, on the other hand, implies higher cognitive demands in the conceptualization stage, resulting in a slower speech rate in both languages.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Saleem Khan

<p>This paper strives to explore the impact of Native Language use on Foreign Language vocabulary learning on the basis of empirical and available data. The study is carried out with special reference to the English Language Programme students in Buraydah Community College, Qassim University, Saudi Arabia. The Native Language of these students is Arabic and their Second Language is English. The participants in this research study are the post-secondary students of Buraydah Community College in Intensive Course Programme. The instrument used in this study was in the form of two tests. It is well known that in language assessment tests play a pivotal role in evaluating the EFL learners’ language proficiency. The use of native language as a semantic tool for assessing second language learners’ understanding shouldn’t be rejected altogether especially for the undergrad Saudi EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students. The outcomes of the study show that in learning the vocabulary of target language is significantly helped by the use of translation method of native language (Arabic) in understanding the meaning of novel words and expressions of foreign language (English). This method is widely welcomed by majority of the students of Buraydah Community College. It’s recommended to use this method in order to take the students directly to the core meaning of the word or expression. It also, sometimes, gives a sense of accuracy of the meaning of native language equivalents.</p>


Transport ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 274-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerija Marina ◽  
Genovaite Snuviškiene

The paper presents linguistic error analysis of articles written by non‐native speakers of English which were published in the journal ‘Transport’ in 2003–2004. The errors were identified, classified and analysed from various perspectives. The main causes of language misuse were also identified and explained within the framework of the theory of linguistic relativity and laws of interference of the native language of the learners. The analysis is aimed at building competence of technical writers in the English language used in scientific papers. The results obtained in the investigation allowed the authors to provide some recommendations to technical writers as to improving the proficiency in scientific English.


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