Second, lexical positive transfer. Words have some aspects in its kinds, and here, we will mainly talk about the word order and the word organization. This kind of transfer can occur in the sequence of time, the sequence of space, the angle of the view and cultural tradition. Natural phenomena and human activities all obey the sequence of time. Words used to describe natural phenomena, such as 东西/east and west, 早晚/from down to dusk, and 往返/people should leave and then return, 来去/people come first and then go, are all in time sequence. In Chinese cultural tradition, China has a long history with strong conception of senior and junior, which reflects two aspects: one is the social position, senior first and junior later, such as将士、官兵、干群、工农、师生、后妃、君臣. The other is the treatment of females as inferior to males, such as男女、夫妻、夫妇、儿女、兄弟、姐妹、 龙凤. Gender discrimination is also a common phenomenon in English history. So it influences the linear order of English phrases, like man and woman, boys and girls, husband and wife. There are some common features in its word organization. In the process of Chinese words learning, the learners like to analyze the shape of the words. In English, many words are formed by suffix, prefix, stem and root. So, in the process of English words learning, the learners can guess the words pronunciation, analyze its structure, and guess its meaning, so they can deepen the memorization of English words through this way. In this aspect, we can say Chinese thinking transfers positively in the process of English words learning and memorization. Take the learners whose first language is Chinese for example, many people like to remember the words by the way of decomposing and storing because of the influence of persified syllables, so as to learn and remember more Chinese words. So, when they learn English words, they will borrow the experience from Chinese words learning and take the way of decomposing and storing to learn English words, so as to get the best effect of words learning and memorization. At the same time, we can say the characteristic of Chinese has strengthening in the process of decomposing and storing English words, because the way of storing in Chinese is more tendency to decomposing and storing.
Third, syntactic positive transfer. The two languages have much in common in the parts of speech. Any language is made up of words. So words are very important in English and Chinese. Both Chinese and English have nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and so on. And there are also same members of the sentence, like subject, predicate verb, object, predicative, complement. There are five main sentence structures, and in Chinese we can find the similar ones: SV; SVC; SVO; SVOO; SVOC. These common features of Chinese and English languages may help the English learners to learn English. In our teaching we sometimes find that the higher a person’s Chinese level, the better his English learning. Of course, it is not absolute, but really so. From the above mentioned, we can see that cross-linguistic similarities can produce positive transfer in phonetics, word order syntax and pragmatics. We should view positive transfer as a process of cognition and a way of communication.
3.2 The Influence of Negative Transfer on English Acquisition
Negative transfer is one that interferes with our second language learning in later situation. Specifically, it refers to the use of native language patterns or rule that leads to an error or inappropriate form in the target language. Negative transfer occurs when the L1 form does not fit in with its norm, and the resultant utterance is erroneous. Negative transfer (or interference) is inhibitive. And also in our teaching process, we should minimize the negative transfer and realize the positive transfer. 母语迁移对英语习得的影响研究(3):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_6833.html