Role of Mother Tongue in Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

Second language refers to any language learned after the first language,while Second Language Acquisition(SLA) means the acquisitio n of a foreign or subsequent language.According to the idea of Traditional Ling uistics,Mother tongue serves only as a negative role(interference) in SLA.As time flies by,this concept is gradually becoming one-sided and can not reflect the essence of language learning.Basing its argument on the theory of language universals,the early approaches to SLA and the author's own empirical studies,the paper offers an all-round introduction of language transfer and role of mother tongue in SLA.We hope the study could make us realize the positive role o f mother tongue in SLA and by means of bilingual teaching,we can make the maxim al use of positive transfer of one's mother tongue.