Negative Transfer

Negative transfer, also called interference or L1 interference, occurs when properties of the learner's first language produce errors in the second. A Vietnamese learner saying I have 25 years under the influence of Tôi có 25 tuổi, or a French speaker pronouncing English think with a fronted /s/-like fricative because French lacks /θ/, is experiencing negative transfer at the syntactic and phonological levels respectively. The term is half of the positive/negative pair introduced by Lado (1957) within the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis.

Theoretical Origins

Lado argued that L2 learning difficulty is a function of L1-L2 distance: similar features facilitate, different features interfere. The strong version of the hypothesis predicted that all L2 errors could be traced to L1 interference and that systematic comparison of the two languages would yield exhaustive lists of predicted errors. Empirical work in the 1970s undermined this. Many predicted errors did not appear, many actual errors had nothing to do with L1, and some errors were uniform across L1 backgrounds (developmental rather than transfer-driven).

The concept survived the demise of the strong hypothesis and was reframed under the broader umbrella of crosslinguistic influence (Kellerman and Sharwood Smith 1986; Odlin 1989). Negative transfer is now understood as one outcome among many rather than the master explanation of L2 errors.

What Transfers Negatively

Following Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008), negative transfer operates at every linguistic level:

• Phonological: substituting L1 phonemes for absent L2 ones, importing L1 prosody and stress patterns
• Lexical: false-friend errors, calqued multi-word expressions, semantic narrowing or broadening
• Morphosyntactic: word-order errors, article omission, tense-aspect mismatches, transferred argument structures
• Pragmatic: misapplied politeness conventions, L1 speech-act realisation
• Discourse: L1 patterns of cohesion, topic-comment ordering, rhetorical structure
• Conceptual: how meanings are categorised (motion verbs, colour terms, spatial relations)

Transfer is also possible as avoidance: learners underuse L2 structures that differ markedly from L1 equivalents, which Schachter (1974) showed in Chinese and Japanese learners producing fewer English relative clauses than expected for their proficiency.

Mediating Factors

Not every L1-L2 difference produces transfer, and the same difference produces transfer in some learners but not others. Key variables:

• Psychotypology (Kellerman 1983): the learner's perception of L1-L2 distance, which can override actual typological distance.
• Markedness: unmarked features transfer more readily than marked ones; learners resist transferring features they sense as language-specific.
• Proficiency: lower-proficiency learners show more transfer overall, but the type of transfer changes with development rather than disappearing.
• Recency and dominance in multilinguals: a recently used or dominant L2 may transfer to L3 more strongly than the L1.

In ELT

For Vietnamese English learners, predictable negative transfer includes the absence of inflectional morphology (third-person -s, plural -s, past -ed) under the influence of Vietnamese isolating morphology; difficulty with consonant clusters and final consonants; substitution of /θ/ and /ð/ with /t/ and /d/; transferred topic-comment word order; calqued idioms (open the television); and tense-aspect mapping mismatches given Vietnamese aspect-marker system.

Useful teaching responses combine explicit contrastive awareness, focused noticing tasks, and corrective feedback that targets recurring transfer patterns rather than treating them as one-off errors. Negative transfer often becomes fossilised when uncorrected at a stage where it stops impeding communication, so addressing it earlier is generally more effective than later.

References

• Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics Across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers. University of Michigan Press.
• Odlin, T. (1989). Language Transfer: Cross-Linguistic Influence in Language Learning. Cambridge University Press.
• Jarvis, S. & Pavlenko, A. (2008). Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition. Routledge.
• Schachter, J. (1974). An error in error analysis. Language Learning, 24(2), 205–214.