英语专业毕业论文（设计）On the Influence of Mother Tongue in Language Learning

1、on the influence of mother tongue in language learninghu feiabstract: people learn english as their foreign language in china. as we know, the foreign language learners are developing their second language (english) competence and performance based on their previous knowledge of mother tongue (chine

2、se). to a large extent, english is different from chinese in many ways, such as pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. therefore, the learners have to face the potential influence of their mother tongue in their foreign language learning. generally speaking, there are positive impact and negative im

3、pact of mother tongue in foreign language learning. through discussing the two kinds of effects, the purpose of this paper is to help the teachers and students find the most effective way to study foreign language and get success of foreign language learning.key words: influence; mother tongue; fore

4、ign language learning; students; teachers i. introductionas we all know, the mother tongue is our first language. and there are two meanings to the mother tongue. the first is that mother tongue is ones native language. and the second is that mother tongue is a parent language. a chinese people will

5、 use mother tongue more or less in foreign language learning. the adults regard the mother tongue as the foundation of foreign language learning. nowadays, thousands of students and teachers still use mother tongue in foreign language learning, especially in lots of poor and distant countries. if th

6、e teachers use english to have a class to primary school students or high school students in the rural areas, they will not understand the teachers meanings. however, according to education departments requirement, most of teachers should use english to have a class in many developed areas or cities

7、. some researches prove that when the teachers try their best to use english in the classroom, it is good for improving students english level or adding their english knowledge. language learning refers to conscious knowledge of a second language, knowing the rules, being aware of them and being abl

8、e to talk about them. with the development of the society and economy, it is becoming more and more important for us to master one or more foreign languages. and the growing number of people has recognized the importance and began to learn foreign language. however, foreign language learning is very

9、 complex and painstaking process. in foreign language learning, there are always problems arising here and there. during learning foreign language, maybe some factors affect the achievement and success of foreign language learning. such as, mother tongue of learners, personal factors of learners and

10、 the environment factors. among them, the mother tongue of learners has the major influence on the foreign language learning. generally speaking, learners develop their foreign language competence and performance based on their mother tongue. the mother tongue has positive and negative impacts on fo

11、reign language learning. and the positive effect has three aspects, namely, increasing the understanding, raising the interest, improving the translation level. and then the negative effect includes pronunciation; vocabulary and grammar. at the same time, different nations have different cultures an

12、d customs. so the cultures and customs also have an influence on the communicational ways. in my paper, i will introduce briefly the positive effect and negative effect of mother tongue in foreign language learning. at the same time, my paper mainly tells the english teachers and students to how to

13、make use of the positive effects and reduce the negative effects of the mother tongue, thus to achieve good and efficient teaching effect. ii. the classification of the influence of mother tonguethe impact of mother tongue is mainly classified into two types, the positive impact and the negative imp

14、act. as we know, when mother tongues rules are similar to the foreign languages rules, it will produce positive impact. so it is able to help students study the foreign language well. therefore, the english teacher can make use of the good chance to let students master a number of ways of learning e

15、nglish. at the moment, the students will combine their mother tongue with the foreign language, because the mother tongue provides them a lot of help. however, if the mother tongues rules are different from the foreign language, it will produce negative impact. it will bring some difficulties to lea

16、rn the foreign language. in this case, the english teachers should try their best to think about some useful and efficient ways to reduce the negative impact. the students and teachers ought to take the advantages of mother tongue, and find some solutions to decrease the disadvantages in foreign lan

17、guage learning. iii. the influence of mother tongue in foreign language learninga. the positive effect of mother tonguethe countrys education departments claim that foreign language learning should not rely on the mother tongue and native culture. the view ignores the positive effect of mother tongu

18、e. if the learners have good knowledge of other tongue, they usually acquire the foreign language more quickly and better than the learners who have no good knowledge of mother tongue. the fact shows that learners are able to make use of mother tongue and regard it as a helpful and valuable resource

19、 in foreign language learning. at the same time, good mother tongue can produce positive effect to foreign language learning. the positive effect of mother tongue has three aspects.1. mother tongue helps the learners understand the foreign languagemany researches believe that most of new information

20、 of the students get is based on their previous knowledge. to an extent, the new information and old knowledge has something in common. a linguist says that “language developing experience of human being is from simple to complex, development of language competence firmly relate to the development o

21、f cognitive competence.” in learning foreign language process, native people will regard their mother tongue as foundation of learning language. therefore, the learners are able to make use of their previous mother tongue knowledge to master the english language rules. at the same time, it can impro

22、ve the efficiency of english learning. and then there are three examples as following to support the first positive effect. firstly, some famous experts do a study to ten high school students and two college students. the experts give the twelve students a picture and then ask them to write an artic

23、le according to the picture. to the experts surprise, the result shows that eleven students use their mother tongue to think and analyze the picture in the starting stage. and 60 percent contents are based on the mother tongue in the expressional stage. the twelve students are the top students, so t

24、heir articles are very wonderful and perfect. and the study suggests that even though these students are so familiar to the english and master many english expressional ways, mother tongue plays an important part in thinking and analyzing the article in english. as for me, when i prepare some materi

25、als about the paper, i also read many chinese books. later, i used the chinese to think the structure of the paper. from the study, the teacher should know the chinese students usually use the chinese ways to think the writing structure. so when some english teachers give students some good advice a

26、bout writing, he or she can make them use the chinese ways to think about the structure at the beginning. and then combine the chinese to the english. secondly, there is another example about teaching practice. when i did my teaching practice, i found that most of students didnt understand the teach

27、ers words, because the teacher spoke english in the classroom. so i had e new class to these students, i just use some simple classroom english. if there were difficult grammars and sentences, i first used the english, and then translated them into chinese. even sometimes i spoke half english and ha

28、lf chinese. after class, i asked some students whether they could understand the contents or not, they gave me a satisfied smile. so the mother tongue let students understand the english class. finally, when most students recite and have a dictation the english words in china, the chinese also suppl

29、ies much help to them. one day, i helped my tutor mark the dictation and i found some students just wrote english words without the chinese meanings. in turn, other students just wrote the chinese meanings. but the teacher read “journal, give up, stubborn and insist”, all the students wrote the engl

30、ish and chinese. the phenomenon shows that the chinese will let students remember the relational english words.in conclusion, all above three examples show that the english teachers ought to pay attention to the fact that chinese can help students learn english well. even in classroom english teachi

31、ng, the teachers should use some proper chinese to help students master english. at the same time, the suitable chinese can increase their confidence of learning english. 2. mother tongue can improve learners interest of learning english. some people say interest is the best teacher. the learning in

32、terest is a positive factor to learners in foreign language learning. if the learners are not interested in the foreign language, they will lose heart in learning process. at the same time, it is the inner motivation. and it should have a good effect.firstly, mother tongue will make many students mo

33、re relaxed and feel more confident in foreign language classroom. some linguistic experts point that if the english teachers dont speak in chinese, it will increase the students physical stress. different students have different competences and levels, so the teacher ought to think about a proper wa

34、y to have an english class. if the teacher speaks all english in classroom, some students will have a sense of lost, lose confidence and lose the learning interest. even some students who hardly understand the english will give up the english. an experiment has proved that 85 percent students think

35、they become more relaxed and more confident in inner if their teacher speak chinese in english class. gradually, some students start to like english when they have interest of learning english.secondly, when the english teacher tells students an interesting and humorous story, chinese have an effici

36、ent impact. in summer holiday in 2010, i was the teacher at a private school. one day, i prepared a very humorous story to tell them. the first time, i told the story in english .as a result, students could not any reaction, because they dont understand the story. and the second time, when i explain

37、ed the difficult sentences, i told them the story again in chinese. in turn, all the students laughed loudly.3. mother tongue can improve students translation leveli remember my english teacher said that the more you master the mother tongue, the better you will learn the foreign language. in other

38、word, the students have good knowledge of mother tongue, they usually acquire the foreign language more quickly and better than the students who have no good knowledge of mother tongue.there are two examples to support the point. when i as a freshman, my teacher write the sentence: dont lock the sta

39、ble door after the horse has been stolen.there are three translations as following:a.不要等到马被盗后，才去锁厩门。b.不要贼走关门。c.亡羊补牢，犹时未完。another example:caution is the parent of safety. one students translation:小心是安全的爸爸。another students translation: 谨慎乃是安全之父。 from these translations, we can know different chinese l

40、evel will produce different english translations. therefore, the english teacher should use mother tongue to help students improve their translation level in english classroom. some students master a large of chinese, and they know all kinds of background knowledge. so their english translation soun

41、ds more wonderful and colorful. however, some students know a little chinese, and their english translation is not wonderful. in a word, the english teacher sometimes will put the students interest into the classroom english teaching. at last, the classroom effect will give you a satisfied smile. so

42、 the chinese increases the students learning interest.b. the negative impact of mother tonguemother tongue is bad for foreign language learning, teacher should less use it in classroom teaching. this kind of realization that mother tongue is our first language exists in china and west society. so i

43、believe that too much mother tongue have an influence on the students more or less in foreign language learning. during foreign language learning, the negative effects of mother tongue are not more than the positive effects. and the negative impacts include the following four aspects. they are in pr

44、onunciation, vocabulary, grammar, culture and custom.1. the important in pronunciationevery language has its special phonetic system and phonetic rules. there are many differences between chinese and english in pronunciation, because the two languages belong to different phonetic systems. each stude

45、nt and teacher should pay attention to it. generally speaking, the chinese students who learn the english dont know that there are some english pronunciations which do not exist in chinese. therefore, many learners can not master the ways of english pronunciation. here are some examples to support t

46、his view.a. vowelthere are many english vowels are different from chinese pronunciation. for example, i, o, u are not vowels in our chinese. the students will get into trouble in learning these pronunciations. and they will regard them as the long vowel. and these double vowels: ei, ai, au, when chi

47、nese students read them, they should read more long than chinese pronunciation. the chinese students usually are affected by the pronunciations custom. therefore, in classroom english teaching, the teachers should let students pay attention to the several points as following: (1)the students ought t

48、o distinguish the length of the vowels. (2)the students should open their month big enough.(3)the students pay attention to their lips rounded or unrounded. some teachers suggest that chinese students should do more listening, practice and imitation in vowels learning process.b. consonantsto an exte

49、nt, the chinese students have some difficulties in learning consonants. there are not some special consonants in chinese. so the students should pay attention to these pronunciations. some students can not distinguish some pronunciations, such as, n, l and v, f. when many students read “night” and “

50、light”, the teacher can not distinguish them. so the teachers should find some solutions to help students to income these difficulties in classroom teaching.c. intonation chinese is a typical tongue language. it has four tongues: the first tongue is level (阴平), the second rise (阳平)，the third fall-ri

51、se (上声)， and the fourth fall (去声). but the english is the intonation language. english has four basic types of intonation, known as the four tones: the falling tone, the rising tone, the fall-rise tone, and the rise-fall tone. when spoken different tones, the same sequence of words may have differen

52、t meanings. for example, the sentence i cant eat anything, when said in the falling tone, is equal meaning to i can eat anything. but if the sentence is said in the fall-rise tone, it implies that there are particular things that i can not eat. in a word, the pronunciation is very important in forei

53、gn language leaning. and the teacher should remind the students grasping the differences between english and chinese. and then the students can master the english. 2. the impact in vocabulary the negative impact of mother tongue is not only in pronunciation but also in the vocabulary. a. the same en

54、glish word has different chinese meaningsthere exist different chinese meanings to the same word in english. and the phenomenon indicates that the chinese students have many difficulties in learning english process. for this reason, the english teacher should try to find some efficient ways to help

55、students. for example, there are many relative words. “brother, sister, grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, cousin” and so on. b. the same chinese word has different english meanings in different language environments. there are some examples about “time”. have no time to do something. (时间) the t

56、imes are different. (时代)in time of peace. (时期) three times. (次数) ten times easier. (倍) beat time (拍子) the umpire called time (暂停) a time payment (分期付款)from these examples, we can see that just one word has so many chinese meanings. in classroom teaching, the teachers and students must take note to t

57、he points.c. the same chinese word has different english meanings.there are some examples about “红”. 红人a famous with somebody in power 红榜glory roll 红茶black tea 红利bonus, extra dividend 红尘the world of mortals 红绿灯traffic light (or signal) 红运good luck 红光满面ones face glowing with health 他脸红了（he）blushes th

58、ere is one chinese “红”, but when learners translate it into chinese in different language environment rules, there are so many english meanings. therefore, teachers grasp the important rules, and make their own classroom teaching more efficient.in conclusion, the changeable and different meanings in english make students confused in foreign language learning. so the learners or teachers ought to try their best to distinguish and master these differences and improve the learning and