Abstract:

Mother tongue is closely connected with second language acquisition. In the course of foreign language acquisition, the positive role of mother tongue in English learning is commonplace. Based the transfer theory and contrastive analysis hypothesis, the paper will analyze the Chinese language’s positive transfer in different ways. From the vantage points of phonetic level, lexical level, syntactic level and cultural level, the paper has discussed  the role of positive transfer in English learning. The aim is to find more effective ways and strategy for Chinese beginners to improve the efficiency in English learning.

Key words:  second language acquisition; positive transfer; English learning; mother tongue; English beginners

摘要：

在外语习得中，母语对学习者的积极影响普遍存在。本文以语言迁移理论、对比分析理论为理论基础，从不同的角度来观察母语正迁移在中国英语初学者中的典型现象。从英语学习中词汇、语法、句法、文化等层面分析汉语正迁移在英语学习中的作用，旨在寻找更加有效的方法和策略，以提高初学者的英语学习效率。

关键词：二语习得；正迁移；英语学习；母语；英语初学者

1. Introduction
Transfer is a concept from psychology. Psychologists have described it as an influence ,which the previous language acquisition has on foreign language learning of learners later. However, transfer happens not just in the psychological area. It is now a linguistic phenomenon. Ellis (1999) made a further study of language transfer and pointed out “Transfer is an important actor of second language acquisition.”
The study of Transfer can trace its history back to the 1960s. Robert Lado once said in his Linguistic Across Culture (1957),language learners tend to connect the forms, meanings, distributions and cultures of their mother tongues with the target language they will learn in future. According to Lado(1957), the transfer of mother language can be further divided into positive transfer and negative transfer. When the target language has common features with the mother tongue. Language learning will be more easy, which means there exits a positive transfer. So some scholars believe that the positive transfer of mother tongue can be used to promote the learning of second language learners, especially in the early period of learning(Ellis,1994).