Introduction

Terence Odlin and Liming Yu

What is Language Transfer?

The word transfer has had many specialized uses and not just in linguistics: for instance, transfer and transference have long appeared in psychology, with different movements (e.g. psychoanalysis and behaviorism) using the words as terms with quite different meanings. Likewise, in linguistics the technical meanings of transfer are far from uniform. Some of the varying uses will be mentioned a little further on, but for now, the working definition that will inform this chapter is as follows: 'Transfer is the influence resulting from the similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired' (Odlin, 1989: 27).

The definition deliberately includes 'any other language' because there are many cases of people learning not only a second language (L2) but also a third (L3). For example, in China many native speakers of Uighur (a Turkic language) have Mandarin Chinese (a Sino-Tibetan language) as their L2 when they begin to study English as their L3, and so similarities and differences between Chinese and English as well as similarities and differences between Uighur and English might affect such learners' acquisition of the L3. Although relatively little study has yet been done on this particular trilingual situation, the steadily growing research field dealing with multilingual settings has documented many cases of both first language (L1) and L2 influence on an L3 as well as the influence of an L3 on an L4, etc. (De Angelis, 2007; De Angelis & Dewaele, 2011; Gabrys-Barker, 2012; Hammarberg, 2009). In our volume, Chapters 3, 11 and 13 consider trilingual or multilingual cases, but the other chapters focus on L1 -> L2 transfer.

Even when only two languages are involved, cross-linguistic influence (which is a synonym for transfer) can be manifested in different ways, as will be seen. Moreover, while an L1 can influence an L2, the reverse is also common (thus constituting L2 -> L1 transfer). For instance, Porte (2003: 112) investigated the English of several native speakers of English who were teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in Spain and found many examples of L2 -> L1 influence: e.g. I was really shocked when I first saw how molested some teachers got at my criticising the system, where molested has the less pejorative meaning of Spanish molestar ('annoy') as opposed to the English molest, which is often used to denote criminality (e.g. child molester). The teachers in Porte's study seem to have been influenced both by some direct knowledge of Spanish and by their relatively long residence in Spain, especially since the molested example could just as easily come from a native speaker of Spanish using English (Nash, 1979). It is also clear that L2 -> L1 influences in grammar are rather common. For example, Pavlenko (2003) found that Russian speakers residing in the USA sometimes used the perfective/imperfective system of verbs in Russian in ways quite different from monolingual speakers in Russia and in ways quite like those found in the L2 Russian of L1 English speakers. Sometimes, the difference between the L2 -> L1 influence and what is called code-switching is subtle or even non-existent, and there likewise exists a large body of research on code-switching (e.g. Isurin et al., 2009), though none of the chapters in our volume focuses on that phenomenon.

In many immigrant situations, both L2 -> L1 and L1 -> L2 transfer are likely in the same community, but an opportunity to study a different kind of bidirectional transfer comes from international schools, where, for example, Italian children who might or might not become permanent residents of England study English, and where English-speaking children study Italian in international schools in Italy. Rocca (2007) investigated just this kind of parallel transfer (L1 Italian influence on L2 English, L1 English influence on L2 Italian) with regard to tense and aspect structures in the target language.

The most typical cases of transfer – and usually the ones that preoccupy language teachers – involve divergences between the source language (whether the L1 or perhaps the L2 in cases of L3 acquisition) and the target language (i.e. the language that learners are seeking to acquire). Such divergences can result in negative transfer, which is often evident in vocabulary problems as when a native speaker of Spanish uses molest in English as a synonym for annoy. Along with such vocabulary problems, negative transfer is often evident in syntactic structures, as in the following sentence from a native speaker of Vietnamese: She has managed to rise the kite fly over the tallest building (=She has managed to fly a kite over the tallest building), where the use of rise ... fly indicates the influence of Vietnamese grammar (Helms-Park, 2003). The pronunciation and spelling patterns of L2 learners likewise show many instances of negative transfer related to pronunciation problems, as seen in a spelling error of a Finnish student who writes crass instead of grass. The Finn's misspelling of grass with either the letter or the letter reflects a phonological fact about the native language: Finnish does not have a phonemic contrast between /k/ and /g/, and learners of English in Finland thus have to learn a new consonant contrast.

While divergences involving pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar naturally compel teachers' attention, a topic just as important for anyone wishing to understand transfer is the complementary phenomenon of positive transfer, which does not...