Lexical Transfer from Vietnamese to English in Noun+Preposition Collocations

Abstract

The paper mainly aims at analyzing lexical transfer that occur in Vietnamese EFL writing.  This study, based on theories on language transfer and errors by Lado (1957), Corder (1967), Odlin (1993), etc., investigates 67 M.A. theses mainly on linguistics written in English by Vietnamese post-graduate students to identify lexical transfer.  Various methods are employed to implement this study, namely the statistical method, error analysis, and comparative-contrastive method. The statistical method is used firstly to identify the frequency of cases of language transfer based on the numbers and percentages of vocabulary and collocation transfers. Then, error analysis is employed to analyze errors in transfer and then find out the causes to such transfer. After that, the comparative-contrastive method is followed to figure out whether there are semantic changes in the meaning of collocations when Vietnamese learners transfer collocations from Vietnamese to English because of the similarities and differences between the two languages. Preliminary results show that both positive and negative transfers appear in Vietnamese EFL writing due to the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese. These results, together with subsequent studies on lexical transfer, will provide significant theoretical and practical grounds for teaching and learning English to and by Vietnamese learners.