A Study on the Effect of L1 to L2 Transfer on the Production of Idiomatic Expressions in L2 Among Mandarin-speaking Intermediate Learners of English
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.220110.117How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Idioms; idiomatic expressions; linguistic production; crosslinguistic transfer; Mandarin Chinese; English
- Abstract
Acquiring idiomatic expressions for second-language learners is a big challenge. This is particularly true for native Mandarin Chinese speakers to learn English idiomatic expressions. The problem could be explained by culture differences and “language transfer”. Previous research did not pay much attention to the influence of L1 on an intermediate second-language learner’s idiomatic repertoire. Our study focuses on the extent to which knowledge of Mandarin Chinese idioms affects the accuracy with which these speakers produce the correct translation of such idioms into English. Inspired by Li’s study, we designed the English idiom translation-focused surveys, recruited 7 and 34 subjects in the pilot study and the actual experiment respectively, and analyzed the data by using the chi-square test. Due to statistical insignificance, we failed to prove our hypotheses, which may be attributed largely to deficiency in the number of the subjects. Some improvement could be done in the future including increasing the number of task takers, assessing the actual English proficiency of the participants, and improving the question set up and the sampling method. A possible topic of future study is the extent of the participants demonstrating traces of idiomatic transfer may be related to two factors: (1) the discrepancies between their environment of acquiring L2 languages; (2) the difference between the education systems.
- Copyright
- © 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Xinran Chen AU - Yiran Du AU - Menghan Qu AU - Shimei Gao PY - 2022 DA - 2022/01/28 TI - A Study on the Effect of L1 to L2 Transfer on the Production of Idiomatic Expressions in L2 Among Mandarin-speaking Intermediate Learners of English BT - Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Public Art and Human Development ( ICPAHD 2021) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 608 EP - 616 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220110.117 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.220110.117 ID - Chen2022 ER -