Language Transfer Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

- by
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- Language Acquisition, Language Transfer, Interlanguage
- by Bahram Kazemian
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- Applied Linguistics, Contrastive Analysis, Language Transfer, Foreign Language

Bilingual language development might be characterized by transfer, deceleration, and/or acceleration, the first two being relevant for the language impairment diagnosis. Studies on bilingual children’s productive phonology show evidence of transfer, but little is known about deceleration in this population. Here, we focused on phonological transfer and deceleration in L1 speech of typically developing Polish-English bilingual children of Polish migrants to the United Kingdom (aged 4.7–7). We analyzed L1 speech samples of 30 bilinguals and 2 groups of Polish monolinguals, matched to the bilinguals on age or vocabulary size. We found that bilingual children’ speech (both simultaneous and early sequential) was characterized by transfer, but not by deceleration, suggesting that while phonological deceleration phases out in children above the age of 4.7, transfer does not. We discuss our findings within the PRIMIR model of bilingual phonological acquisition (Curtin et al., 2011) and show...

- by Magdalena Wrembel
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- Child Development, Linguistics, Cross Linguistic Studies, Bilingualism

"The influence of the learner’s first language (L1) knowledge, including vocabulary, on second language (L2) learning has been well-documented over the past several decades. Moreover, research in ESL writing education has investigated and upheld the value of writing process techniques, such as prewriting, for improving student writing skills. However, research concerning the effects of the L1 lexicon on L2 writing vocabulary has been scant. Lally (2000) studied the effects of both L1 and L2 prewriting tasks on L2 writing production, finding that the L1 prewriting task improved L2 vocabulary slightly better than the L2 prewriting task, a result that the researcher admitted was surprising. The Lally study has important implications for ESL writing pedagogy and second language acquisition studies, and therefore the topic merits further investigation. The purpose of the current research is to study whether a L1 prewriting task increases the complexity of L2 written vocabulary.
The study participants are matriculated nonnative English-speaking students at a U.S. university. The Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP), a computer program developed by Heatley, Nation, and Coxhead (1995), is used to measure the changes in L2 vocabulary use on two L2 writing tasks. The second writing task (i.e., the posttest) is preceded by the prewriting activity which engages the participants’ L1 lexicon. Results from an exploratory study indicate that a positive relationship exists between the L1 prewriting activity and the complexity of L2 vocabulary employed on the posttest writing task.
A follow-up study, to be conducted in the summer and fall of 2004, will collect data from a larger sample of participants randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The analysis procedure measures changes in the dependent variable by employing the t-test to compare the posttest LFP mean scores. Other measures, such as ANOVA, may also be used to explore the relationship further.
"

The aim of the paper is (1) to categorize and describe transfer errors which appear in the written texts by the students of the first three years of French Philology and (2) to establish possible reasons for their appearance. We analyzed a corpus of 130 examples of errors related to transfer from English (students’ L2) to French (their L3). The collected data was distributed into ten categories. We also analyzed students’ responses to a questionnaire, which helped to establish their level of knowledge regarding the henomenon and to give a handful of possible reasons for the appearance of transfer from L2 in the students’ written texts.

- by Jadwiga Cook
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- Multilingualism, Language Transfer, Foreign language learning, L3 Acquisition

The field of Arabic as a foreign language has not been thoroughly researched. Many foreigners, especially Americans, come to Morocco to study Arabic for many reasons. The difference between learners’ mother tongue (L1) and Arabic as a target language (TL) makes the learning process lengthy and challenging. This article tries to investigate how language transfer pushes Arabic L2 learners to produce ungrammatical sentences. To put it succinctly, what is the role of L1 in learning
Arabic as an L2/ L3? The results show that learners transfer their L1 setting into the target language. That is, the major source of errors made by Arabic L2 learners is caused by language transfer (overgeneralization and interference).

- by Messouab Imad
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- Second Language Acquisition, Language Transfer, Universal grammar

Perception of a nonnative language (L2) is known to be affected by crosslinguistic transfer from a listener’s native language (L1), but the relative importance of L1 transfer vis-a-vis individual learner differences remains unclear. This study explored the hypothesis that the nature of L1 transfer changes as learners gain experience with the L2, such that individual differences are more influential at earlier stages of learning and L1 transfer is more influential at later stages of learning. To test this hypothesis, novice L2 learners of Korean from diverse L1 backgrounds were examined in a pretest-posttest design with respect to their perceptual acquisition of novel L2 consonant contrasts (the three-way Korean laryngeal contrast among lenis, fortis, and aspirated plosives) and vowel contrasts (/o/-/ʌ/, /u/-/ɨ/). Whereas pretest performance showed little evidence of L1 effects, posttest performance showed significant L1 transfer. Furthermore, pretest performance did not predict post...

- by Sungmi Kwon
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- Languages, Second Language Acquisition, Phonology, Phonetics

Læringsprosess og kunnskapstransfer har sentral plass som et forsøk på å forstå hvordan mennesker utvikler viktige kompetanser i livet. Det er viktig å lære utover livet, for ingen er bare født med evnen til å være en kompetent og velfungerende voksen i samfunnet. Uansett er det viktigst å forstå læringsprosessen som fører til transfer, og som i tillegg defineres som evne til å utvide kunnskapen man har tilegnet seg i en sammenheng, til nye, kommende situasjoner.

- by Hacer Hande Uysal
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- Discourse Analysis, Literacy, Rhetoric, Composition and Rhetoric
- by Joy Iris-Wilbanks
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- TESOL, Language Transfer, English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
- by Max Cortés Moreno and +1
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- Curriculum Design, Student Motivation And Engagement, Foreign language teaching and learning, Language Games

La presente investigación describe las actitudes referentes al uso del inglés y el español de profesores y alumnos de segundo y cuarto semestre de una escuela de nivel medio superior de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, a fin de conocer el lugar que tienen ambos idiomas, así como sus usos dentro del aula y la participación de los factores afectivos; asimismo, tiene como objetivo indicar la relación que puede haber entre dichas actitudes y los niveles de competencia , así como el sistema de creencias o metodología del profesor. Finalmente, busca comparar las actitudes de los profesores con las de los estudiantes. El estudio es de carácter descriptivo el cual hace uso de un método mixto de investigación con un diseño anidado concurrente de predominancia cuantitativa. Para su realización se elaboró, validó y aplicó una encuesta a los alumnos, otra encuesta similar a profesores y una entrevista semiestructurada a profesores con el fin de conocer más a fondo el porqué de sus actitudes y las razones pedagógicas, afectivas y contextuales de las mismas. Los datos cuantitativos fueron analizados a través del programa estadístico SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) mientras que los datos cualitativos fueron grabados y posteriormente transcritos para su análisis y categorización. En general, se encontró una actitud neutra con respecto al uso del inglés y al español independientemente del sistema de creencias del profesor y el nivel de competencia, donde tanto docentes como alumnos estuvieron de acuerdo con utilizar el español en el aula pero se mostraron también a favor de maximizar el inglés. Así pues, mientras el inglés se espera como lenguaje que se debe fomentar en el aula de manera paulatina, el español sirve de apoyo para bajar el filtro afectivo y dar más seguridad a los estudiantes en varias situaciones que ocurren en el aula y en aspectos pedagógicos. Dichas actitudes resultaron estar marcadas por el contexto.

The aim of this paper is to investigate errors made by second and foreign language (L2) learners so as to understand the strategies and techniques used in the process of second and foreign language learning. Error analysis is a very important area of applied linguistics as well as of second and foreign language learning. It is also a systematic method to analyze learners' errors. Errors are not always bad, rather they are crucial parts and aspects in the process of learning a language. They may provide insights into the complicated processes of language development as well as a systematic way for identifying, describing and explaining students' errors. Errors may also help to better understand the process of second and foreign language acquisition. This study tries to investigate why Pakistani ESL and Iranian EFL learners fail to produce grammatically correct sentences in English, in spite of having English as a compulsory subject at all levels in their learning institutions and schools. What are the reasons for their poor English written performance? In the present study, the writing assignments of university students as well as intermediate English learners were analyzed for the purpose of error analysis. Results of the analysis suggest that students lack grammatical accuracy in their writing and are not sure of the grammatical rules that may apply in their writing in English. The study concludes that they are highly influenced by the rules of their first language (L1).

- by Bahram Kazemian and +1
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- Contrastive Analysis, Language Transfer, English as a Foreign Language (EFL), Error Analysis
- by Filiz Cele
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- Language Transfer

This paper reports on the use of language transfer as a type of communication strategy and language learning strategy drawing on a variety of oral interaction activities from a Malaysian classroom for English as a second language. The study provides insights into not only how the learners’ first language functions as a strategy for communication but also how it can enhance second language learning by way of
helping learners expand their second language repertoire and increase their automatization of second language items.

Language Transfer and Grammatical Speaking Errors among Saudi Students
Nesreen Saud Alahmadi School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Radia Kesseiri School of Modern Languages and Culture University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Abstract
The English language has certainly become the most prominent international language in the world. Various initiatives in non-English speaking countries have sprung out to promote the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language and the Arab world is certainly no exception to the rule. The study will focus on Saudi Arabia where new plans, are to be initiated to improve students’ language proficiency in view of the tremendous importance of English as an international language and its critical role in the commercial, industrial, technological, and audio-economic development of the Kingdom. This brings up to surface the issue of language transfer errors and its crucial role on speaking proficiency. This paper aims to discuss grammatical errors resulting from language transfer amongst Saudi students. The study will discuss the extent to which the language transfer theory is accepted or rejected. Accordingly, thirty Saudi students were interviewed in the process in Saudi Arabia The study will be accordingly divided into three main sections: firstly, it will look into the acceptance and the rejection of the language transfer theory. Secondly, an analysis of students` grammatical speaking errors will be presented according to the source of errors. Thirdly, this study will provide education practitioners to place greater focus on improving spoken English skills in order to raise speaking proficiency in Saudi Arabia. Finally, the paper will conclude with some suggestions to tackle the issue of speaking errors among Saudi students.
Keywords: Language transfer, Saudi Arabia, speaking, grammatical errors, learning input

- by Arab World English Journal (AWEJ)
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- Language Transfer
- by fauziatul husna
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- Pragmatics, Indonesian Studies, Language Transfer

Over the last decades, relationships among language, culture and identity have become a favourite topic in social science, due to this fact, some scholars have lately begun to pay systematic attention to many areas in the field of pragmatic failure (Dunworth 2002), however, little research has been devoted to both the pragmatic failure considering the deontic and epistemic illocutionary force in the answers provided by Spanish tertiary students and the way these students answer in terms of politeness. This has become an important aspect of analysis as it is in its infancy. As Leech (1983) and Brown and Levinson (1987:216) explain that the pragmatic force of an utterance is normally contradictory or uncertain, even in context, and often deliberately. For reasons of politeness, the speaker and hearer should intentionally exploit this contrariness. Along this line, this paper aims at answering the following research questions:
(1) With what frequency do deontic modals cause pragmatic failure in students’ responses in contrast to epistemic modals?
(2) Does “language transfer” cause a major limitation when interpreting the illocutionary
forces of epistemic and deontic modals? Could language transfer break down communication?
(3) Can deontic and epistemic pragmatic failure be interpreted as impolite?
Data for this research were gathered from 30 Spanish tertiary students in English linguistics who ranged in age from 22 to 24 having just graduated from college (BA) and finding themselves at a postgraduate level of studies. This study used a questionnaire which was developed by considering two variables. The first variable included participant’s native language, cultural background and place of residence, age and foreign language knowledge. The second variable referred to the intention purported in the questionnaire, that is, the participants had limited options in the answers they could provide, two options were given regarding epistemic modality (could and may) and two referring to deontic modality (can and must); students were expected to answer using one of these options only, but in those cases in which the students considered that any of the possibilities were suitable, they were allowed to provide an optional free answer. The dialogue-type focused on different scenarios ranging from formal to colloquial situations.
The findings reveal that Spanish tertiary students do often commit more errors when interpreting the illocutionary force of epistemic modals in contrast to the use of deontic modals. The deontic modals cause less problems in its interpretation due to language transfer and similarity across cultures and languages. However, when using epistemic modal verbs students showed less capacity of cross-cultural pragmatics, being unable to identify the illocutionary force of the question and claims and therefore setting up a linguistic-cultural barrier in communication.

- by JOHN FREDY GIL BONILLA
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- Linguistic Politeness, Modality, Language Transfer, Epistemic modality

This study examines the acquisition of L2 knowledge (Spanish determiners) by four groups of adolescents as (L2) Spanish learners, taking into consideration two types of instruction: implicit and explicit. Another purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effects of the type of instruction (implicit vs. explicit) on language transfer L1 English-L2 Spanish.
The groups in this study were part of two different courses at a High School level in the United States during a winter trimester. Two groups were of higher proficiency and the other two, of lower proficiency. Groups with the same proficiency were instructed with both, implicit and explicit methods.
We focus on contrasting the results of both proficiency groups and their specific methods of instruction. Forty-five adolescent (L2) learners of Spanish carried out six written tasks (Timed Grammaticality Judgment Test, Untimed Grammaticality Judgment Test, L2 Achievement task, Truth-Value Judgment Task, Picture-Sentence Matching Task and Sentence-Picture Acceptability Judgment Task) before and immediately after the implicit and explicit methods of instruction were complete.
The research conducted in this thesis contains five questions, whose answers were addressed through the statistical analysis of the raw scores obtained in the different mentioned tasks. The research results show that the methods of instruction were significant taking into consideration the proficiency of the students. The higher proficiency group had higher scores than the lower proficiency group on all the measures of implicit and explicit knowledge, developing significantly more explicit knowledge representations of the forms tested than the lower proficiency group. In relation to transfer effects, results show that the explicit method can help the higher proficiency group to more resemble native speakers.

In learning English as a foreign or second language, Thai students have to encounter a large group of verbs collectively called "causative verbs." Typologically speaking, English belongs to the family of languages which encode two major semantic components "CAUSE" and "CHANGE OF STATE" in a single lexical unit (i.e. a single word) whereas other languages (one of which is Thai) prefer to express these semantic components separately via multiple separate lexical units (i.e. at least two words). To illustrate, while an English speaker would say "The tiger frightens the child", a Thai speaker would say "เสื อท ำให้ เด็ กกลั ว" (literally translated as "The tiger makes the child frightened"). To elaborate, the single English causative verb "frighten" is equivalent to the Thai pair of verbs "ท ำให้ + กลั ว" (i.e. "make + frightened). Despite these observable differences in terms of lexical patterns, there seem to be some similarities with regard to a certain class of verbs in Thai and English. For example, there is a Thai verb such as "เปิ ด" which, to most Thai-English speakers, corresponds to the English verb "open." In this paper, it is, however, argued with theoretical and empirical evidence that 1.) Thai causative verbs (e.g. "เปิ ด") are not semantically equivalent to the English counterparts (e.g. "open"), 2.) the subtle differences regarding lexical patterns contribute to learning problems of a large number of Thai EFL students and 3.) positive evidence alone does not seem to be enough to help the students fully acquire English lexical causatives.

This paper aims to study Arab students’ use of English relative pronoun ‘who’ via translating statements from their mother tongue (Arabic) into the target language (English). Thirty Saudi adult students, aged 18-20 years old, were asked to translate 20 relative clauses from Arabic into English. The results revealed that the students encountered various problematic areas in the use of relative pronoun 'who', viz. use of personal and possessive relative pronoun, position of relative pronoun, presence of resumptive pronouns in Arabic, absence of duality and plurality of relative pronoun “who”, and use of relative pronouns with prepositional verbs. Such problematic areas were manifested in various errors of omission, addition, selection, word order, and avoidance. The results also showed that the average of the students’ errors in “avoidance, omission, and selection” were significantly higher than (30 %. 25%. and 24% respectively) the average for ‘addition’ and ‘word order’. These errors could be attributed to language transfer, overgeneralization, and ignorance of rules restriction, which were possibly grounded in the lack of exposure to the TL rules and insufficient practice of grammatical activities. Pedagogical implications of this study suggest that instructors should make a good use of the recommendations of contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH) and Error Analysis (EA). Namely, the students should be made aware of the areas of similarities and differences between English and Arabic practically rather than theoretically. The study stresses the limitations of the findings and directs outlines for future
Research

This paper attempts to explore the effect of Chinese (L1) syntactic structures on the accurate production of English (L2) writing composition. The paper gives an overview of the literature concerning the field of Cross-Linguistic Influence (CLI) and also classifies the errors encountered by second language learners. Using 9 PMP writing exam papers, frequency of errors was recorded and then an error analysis was carried out to ascertain if there were any statistically significant errors. Errors were then situated in Stockwell, Bowen and Martin’s (1965) Hierarchy of Difficulty. The statistics show that, of the 19 error categories, 12 error categories were statistically significant which shows that Chinese learners of English have difficulty with many syntactic structures in English due to the negative language transfer of their L1. The findings suggest that English language instructors would perhaps be more effective if they emphasised learning areas of the English language which do not correspond well with the Chinese language.

- by Max Cortés Moreno
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- Phonology, Curriculum Design, Phonetics, Student Motivation And Engagement
- by manolya aşık
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- Language Transfer
- by Meaola Amituanai-Toloa
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- Cognitive Science, Language Acquisition, Linguistics, Bilingualism

Language transfer is defined as the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps
imperfectly) acquired (Odlin, 1989). The notion of transfer was raised with the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) by the behaviorist psychologists. According to this view, native
language (NL) affects second language and it was the source of error in production and/or reception (Gass & Selinker, 2001).The present study aims to investigate the transfer effects of Turkish (L1) learners of English (L2). Specifically, the present study examines the acquisition of word order (verb placement) in Turkish EFL learners. The participants were 19 Turkish
EFL learners enrolled in a Language Preparatory Program at a private university in Turkey.
Data came from picture description and grammaticality judgment tasks. The results revealed significant evidence for syntactic transfer due to different word order patterns between the two languages.

- by Enisa Mede
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- Language Transfer

This study investigated second language (L2) English and L2 Japanese essay writing in comparison with the learners’ first language (L1) to elucidate the effect of L1 transfer. Analysis of the functions of I think and to-omou and to-kangaeru were done from a usage-based account and discoursal point of view. Samples were collected from a multilingual written corpus, The Corpus of Multilingual Opinion Essays by College Students (Okugiri, Ijuin, & Komori, 2015). A rhetorical analysis showed different functions in the use of I think between learners and native speakers. In L2 English, Japanese learners showed a strong tendency to use I think to emphasise or mark the following sentence as their main argument. Meanwhile, native speakers use this only to explain a personal experience or to indicate uncertain information. The overuse suggests the possible transfer of to-omou and to-kangaeru from Japanese. In L2 Japanese, English learners produced to-omou and to-kangaeru more than Japanese learners did with I think in L2 English, even though English learners rarely produce I think in L1 English. The results are likely to imply the effect of instruction in a beginning Japanese class.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the necessity of creating favourable conditions so that learners may recognize and make use of the existing learning opportunities at their disposal. Such a process of awareness is directed at becoming more conscious of learning strategy use and, in particular, of the way one personally applies language knowledge transfer.
After briefly examining the literature on out-of-class learning including linguistic landscape and ICT, as well as considering the ever challenging issue of language transfer, this paper will present some research findings that are worth mentioning and debating for at least two reasons.
Firstly, they showed a consistent lack of awareness in students’ ways of considering how (when, where, how often) they use foreign language(s): for instance, they seem unable (or unprepared) to grasp the learning opportunities that environment naturally provides - the kind of learning that, according to van Lier (1998:157), continuously occurs in a learner’s everyday social world. Secondly, a rather large discrepancy has been registered between students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the nature and quantity of foreign language use by pupils outside school, thus putting into question teaching practices implemented with the scope of helping students transfer language knowledge.

- by Marcella Menegale
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- Learner Autonomy, Language Learning, Language Transfer, Out-Of-Class Learning

This article presents a unique trilingual (Hebrew, Turkic, and Slavic) religious literary work from the personal archive of Avraham Firkowicz (National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg). The text, containing 129 lines (verses) in Hebrew characters, is written in Firkowicz’s own hand. Its author has not been reliably identified, but it is assumed that he could be a Karaite Jew from Łuck / Lutsk (Wolhynia, present-day Ukraine) with a good speaking-level knowledge of Slavic and Turkish (e.g., Joseph-Solomon Lutski or Mordechai Sultanski). The language of the Turkic version is a variety of Crimean Judeo-Turkic with many Turkish (Oğuz) features; the language of the Slavic version is based on standard Russian of the early 19th century with Church Slavonic, Ukrainian, and Polish elements.

- by Alexander Grishchenko
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- Jewish - Christian Relations, Crimean Tatar, Language Transfer, Karaites

Prepositions form a hurdle for several EFL learners, Arabs in particular. One major catalyst is that the preposition systems in English and Arabic rarely correspond to one another. Most scholars who researched this area concentrated on the problem itself, rather than finding a successful remedy that can empower these students to masterfully handle such a thorny area. This study is novel inasmuch as it concerns itself with finding means of facilitating this language area for Arab learners. It reveals the effectiveness of using translation to teach English prepositions to these learners. The research question of this study is: do students who have received explicit tuition and adequate practice on the use of English prepositions in translated texts naturally perform better using such grammatical items in subsequently translated texts than those who have not been instructed on such exemplars in similar language contexts? Sixty students at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait participated in the field experiment. The study paradigm had a pre-test/post-test protocol. While the pre-test included four fill-in-the-gap exercises, the post-test contained three Arabic passages which participants were required to translate into English. The findings showed that teaching prepositions explicitly in translated texts is a viable technique for EFL learners' mastery of such grammatical items. This has implications for EFL specialists and syllabus designers.

The present study investigates the correlation between language proficiency, collocations and the role of L1 transfer with collocations. This is a quantitative research. The research places more emphases on collecting data in the form of numbers. It is also experimental research in the sense that it tests participants to measure their variables. The participants of the study were 57 Persian B.A students, both male and female from Islamic Azad University of Bandar Abbas, Iran. The results showed that there is a significant relationship between Iranian subjects' language proficiency, as measured by the Michigan proficiency test and their knowledge of collocations, as measured by their performance on a collocation test designed for the current study. The results obtained from the research indicate that Iranian EFL learners are more likely to use the right collocation in cases of L1 transfer. This suggests that positive transfer plays a major role when it comes to EFL learners' ability to produce the right collocations in their L2. The findings of this study have some implications for language teaching. Teachers can put emphasis on the inclusion of selected grammatical and lexical collocations in reading comprehension passages.

Our study, targeting t
he Francophone learners of Slovak, is focused on Linguistic Interference
and Negative Language Transfer. We suppose that the mother tongue or native language
–
French Language has an influence on the language learned
–
Slovak Language.
The research
is carr
ied out mainly in the field of Morpho
-
syntax and has to find the reasons for grammar
mistakes and a way how to learn Slovak as a foreign language in a more efficient way.
It
would like to prevent Francophone learners of Slovak language to learn it only by
heart. The
study is an analysis and a comparison
of data collected in a
pre-survey.

- by Muhammad Shahbaz
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- Applied Linguistics, Contrastive Analysis, Language Transfer, Foreign Language

Much of the current research into language learning and teaching is concerned with the phenomenon referred to as language transfer, especially with its negative effects in terms of second language acquisition and production. The advantages of language transfer, however, have received rather scant attention despite the fact that cross-linguistic influence may be seen as an effective language learning strategy. That is why this paper is to lay emphasis on the positive aspects of foreign languages already known to learners—on the previous knowledge of one’s second language that is likely to blaze a trail for both new vocabulary and grammatical structures in other languages. Based on a survey conducted among students, the paper aims to explore the instances of cross-linguistic influence as regards third language learners, as well as to evaluate their level of knowledge concerning language transfer and its didactic application.

Research on the linguistic knowledge of heritage speakers has been concerned primarily with the advantages conferred by heritage language experience in production, perception, and (re)learning of the heritage language. Meanwhile, second-language speech research has begun to investigate potential benefits of first-language transfer in second-language performance. Bridging these two bodies of work, the current study examined the perceptual benefits of heritage language experience for heritage speakers of Korean in both the heritage language (Korean) and the dominant language (American English). It was hypothesized that, due to their early bilingual experience and the different nature of unreleased stops in Korean and American English, heritage speakers of Korean would show not only native-like perception of Korean unreleased stops, but also better-than-native perception of American English unreleased stops. Results of three perception experiments were consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that benefits of early heritage language experience can extend well beyond the heritage language.

- by Charles B Chang
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- Phonetics, English language, Speech perception, Crosslinguistic studies

This qualitative descriptive study explored the influence of Dhivehi, the first language (L1) of the Maldivian students on learning English, their second language (L2). The questions raised in this paper enabled to identify morphological, lexical and syntactic transfer errors present in the narratives written by thirty-three students at secondary level from three schools in Male', the capital of the Maldives. Transfer Analysis was used to analyze errors present in the English narratives written by Maldivian ESL (English as a Second Language) learners. The analysis uncovered negative transfer of Dhivehi linguistic features in their written English at morphological, lexical, as well as syntactic levels. The findings provide invaluable pedagogical implications for second language learning in the Maldivian context. Thus, it is recommended that ESL teachers as well as curriculum developers in the Maldives take into consideration the possibility of the influence of students' mother tongue or Dhivehi linguistic features on the process of learning English.