2。2 Language Transfer Theories

2。2。1 Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis

    From the mid 20 century, language transfer got much attention from linguists, and many study theories therefore emerged。 Under the behaviorism theory, contrastive analysis hypothesis prevailed during 1950s and 1960s。 The hypothesis holds the point that the mistakes and difficulties we may meet when second language learning can be predicted by comparing the target language to mother tongue。 The purpose of contrastive analysis is to find out the similarities and difference, and according to which to create conditions to realize the positive transfer and prevent or reduce the negative transfer, even to let learners purposely monitor the influence of negative transfer。 Contrastive analysis hypothesis holds that the main barrier in second language acquisition is negative transfer, and the positive transfer is caused by the similarities between mother tongue and target language while the negative transfer is caused by the differences between them。 But this hypothesis has obvious deficiency, that is when the mother tongue does not have the relevant distinction that exists in the target language, learners can not group the new distinction according to the system of mother tongue, which will cause the difficulties in target language learning。 For example, there is no article in Chinese while there is in English。文献综述

    Because the foresee ability of contrastive analysis hypothesis, it was greatly welcome by language teaching in 1950s and 1960s。 However, it began to be queried from 1970s for its inherent deficiency。 The prediction ability of the hypothesis is limited, and it is unscientific to equate the differences with the difficulties。 Difference is a concept in language while difficulty is a concept in psychology。 Researches revealed the similarities can also be difficulty under some conditions。