Positive effects of native language in the foreign language learning and teaching

Native language has been rejected for a long time in the foreign language class, which results from a misunderstanding to native language transfer by most teachers. Actually, it is an effective learning strategy to complete the communication task under the help of native language, which should be acknowledged. Using native language to explain specific words or grammar rules can take advantage of the limited class-time efficiently and increase the class efficiency; using native language to discuss teaching method and solve the problems for the students can promote their enthusiasm. In these specific teaching processes, native language is an important teaching resource. Instances identify that native language has positive effects in the foreign language learning and teaching and it should have its own standpoint.

Study of Negative Effects of the Native Language Transfer on Second Language Acquisition

Language transfer has long been one of significant parts of the studies on the second language acquisition(SLA). The native language transfer will inevitably generate definite influences on SLA, negative or positive; it is less important to study the positive effects of the native language transfer. This paper is aimed to give a brief analysis on negative effects of the native language transfer in SLA with those English learners whose mother tongue is Chinese as examples. Meanwhile, in English teaching and learning, realization of negative transfers of the native language and utmost avoidance of them can improve the English learners' learning quality.

Keeping a Native Language

Chinese-Mongolian bilingual education has been thriving in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous

Foreign Language Teacher Recruitment： Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Findings

In some contexts such as private language schools of Iran language teachers are recruited mainly on the basis of their speaking fluency and in other EFL contexts they are recruited simply because they are native speakers. Moreover, previous studies mainly focus on comparing the effectiveness of native and non-native language teachers by exploring learners＇ and teachers＇ perceptions of native and non-native language teachers. Since recruitment criteria are theoretically unjustified and the results of previous studies are subjective and inconclusive, this study aims at making a case in the opposite direction. That is, the researchers argue that there should be： （1） a shift away from recruiting language teachers on the basis of their speaking fluency and native language background towards hiring language teachers on the basis of their professional performance in the language classroom; （2） a shift away from exploring learners＇ and teachers＇ perceptions of native and non-native teachers towards studying the effect of teachers＇ native language on learners＇ proficiency, accuracy, fluency, and achievement. To pave the way for these shifts, this study first reviews the theoretical perspectives and empirical findings concerning effective language teachers and then draws conclusions and implications which help interested stakeholders, i.e., supervisors, make informed decisions when they recruit language teachers.

Interlanguage Phonological System of L1 Cantonese Learners of English

This paper aims to study the unique interlanguage phonological system of the L1 Cantonese learners of English in GuangdongProvince, including the roles of the differences between native language and target language, language transfer and other constraints dur-ing the interlanguage formation process. An experiment has been designed to test the pronunciation of targeted consonants of the voca-tional college students, who are English majors with Cantonese as native language but are also exposed to Mandarin for a long time. Re-sults show that the sounds that do not exist in native language are easily pronounced incorrectly. The phonological system the subjectsdevelop to substitute the targeted consonants is quite different from that of the L1 Cantonese learners from Hong Kong and is also variedfrom that of the L1 Mandarin learners from other province of China's Mainland. It confirms that the L1 Cantonese learners of English inGuangdong Province do have a unique phonological system in their interlanguage and that special attention should be paid by teachersduring the teaching of English pronunciation.

Functions of Chinese in Secondary EFL Classroom in China

The use of native language in EFL teaching is very common. Although teachers avoid using it, the native language, however, is sometimes quite necessary in practical language teaching. In this paper, the authors investigate the use of native language （Chinese） by two teachers in English classroom, analyze and interpret the functions of Chinese in detail. We argue that far from being viewed as a random activity, use of native language can be seen as a purposeful activity.

An Analysis of Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue to Oral English and the Countermeasures

In the Chinese language market,English occupies a great position.The general public has gradually realized the impor⁃tance of mastering another language.However,due to the lack of language environment for learning English,mother tongue can eas⁃ily affect English learning production,which has two sides.Through the comparison between English and Chinese pronunciation,the negative transfer of native language in the acquisition process of English learners is analyzed,especially in oral English.Ac⁃cording to the existing problems,teaching suggestions are put forward for teachers’phonetic teaching and students’phonetic learn⁃ing to help learners reduce the negative effects of their mother tongue in the process of English acquisition.

Finding Dutch natives in online forums

Law enforcement agencies have a restricted area in which their powers apply,which is called their jurisdiction.These restrictions also apply to the Internet.However,on the Internet,the physical borders of the jurisdiction,typically country borders,are hard to discover.In our case,it is hard to establish whether someone involved in criminal online behavior is indeed a Dutch citizen.We propose a way to overcome the arduous task of manually investigating whether a user on an Internet forum is Dutch or not.More precisely,we aim to detect that a given English text is written by a Dutch native author.To develop a detector,we follow a machine learning approach.Therefore,we need to prepare a specific training corpus.To obtain a corpus that is representative for online forums,we collected a large amount of English forum posts from Dutch and non-Dutch authors on Reddit.To learn a detection model,we used a bag-of-words representation to capture potential misspellings,grammatical errors or unusual turns of phrases that are characteristic of the mother tongue of the authors.For this learning task,we compare the linear support vector machine and regularized logistic regression using the appropriate performance metrics f1 score,precision,and average precision.Our results show logistic regression with frequency-based feature selection performs best at predicting Dutch natives.Further study should be directed to the general applicability of the results that is to find out if the developed models are applicable to other forums with comparable high performance.