The 9th International Conference on English Language Teaching (ELT) In China (ELT2020)

412 / 2020-02-27 15:38:29

Logical connectors and L1 transfer effects

logical connectors; L1 transfer effects

Second Language Acquisition > Second Language Acquisition

This study makes use of Jarvis’s (2000) methodological framework to investigate the first language (L1) transfer effects on college English majors’ use of logical connectors. The study focuses on English logical connectors, comprising four categories, additive, adversative, causal, and temporal, under the Halliday and Hasan's (1976) cohesion classification standards. The study adopts Coh-Metrix text analysis tool (Crossley & McNamara, 2012), supplemented by manual annotation, to examine logical connectors in 185 English majors’ essays from a provincial university as compared to 185 native English learners' essays from the the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) and 185 essays of English learners with French as mother tongue from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) respectively. The study aims to find L1 transfer evidences in the use of logical connectors, that is, intragroup homogeneity in learners’ IL (interlanguage) performance, intergroup heterogeneity in learners’ IL performance, and crosslinguistic performance congruity between learners’ L1 and IL performance. Results confirm the L1 transfer effects on adversative, causal and temporal connectors except for additive connectors.This study also analyzes the reasons for the L1 transfer effects phenomenon illustrated by the examples from English majors’ essays.