Dr. Marina Dodigovic
American University of Armenia, Armenia
Second language learners transfer the assumptions about vocabulary from their native language to the second language. This transfer often goes unaddressed, as it is not obvious or transparent to monolingual second language tutors. A catalogue of transfer instances would alert all tutors who are expected to assess language as an aspect of student’s work to this cross-linguistic issue. It would also help students recognize and address the false assumptions about the behaviour of target language words. This study examines three types of lexical transfer based on the underlying lexical units, which can be a single polysemous word, a collocation (i.e. a combination of two content words) and a multiword unit (MWU), which according to Biber (2013) and Schmitt (2000) consist of a group of words with a meaning that is not necessarily related to any of the individual words represented. Since the use of collocations and MWU often distinguishes native speakers of a language from its non-native speakers, it is vital that language transfer in these areas is identified and appropriately addressed through second language education.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Second International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2018, Ahwaz.
