Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 9, 31 October 2023
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The Effects of Mandarin Chinese and Czech Negative Transfers on English Language Acquisition
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
English has become the most studied second language around the world. Regardless of nationality, speakers of another native language other than English face challenges in acquiring English due to their fixed linguistic habits. This is a phenomenon called negative transfer. Mandarin and Czech are completely unrelated in terms of language family; thus, they can be used in this study to prove that the interference of the mother tongue with English happens inevitably and usually shares common areas of negative transfers. Since the author is a native speaker of Mandarin and Czech, her knowledge of the lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactic characteristics of these languages is used to demonstrate why native speakers of these two languages are prone to making specific English mistakes. At the same time, it relies heavily on first-hand accounts of common English errors gathered by other researchers to improve the study’s dependability. The finding of this study argues that the negative transfer occurs because Mandarin and Czech lack the corresponding linguistic qualities of English. Native speakers of these two languages frequently struggle to remember English collocations, non-existent phonemes cannot be accurately pronounced, and similarly incompatible English tenses are used with errors. The absence of articles and the tendency for random word order also cause them to frequently go wrong in English usage. This research can be used as a resource for Chinese and Czech English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers to improve the quality of their classes.
Keywords
negative transfer, Mandarin Chinese, Czech, ESL
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Educational Innovation and Philosophical Inquiries
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-041-7
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-042-4
- Published Date
- 31 October 2023
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/9/20231091
- Copyright
- 31 October 2023
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited