New Perspectives on Transfer in Second Language Learning

When people attempt to learn a new language, the language(s) they already know can help but also hinder their understanding or production of new forms. This phenomenon, known as language transfer, is the focus of this book. The collection offers new theoretical perspectives, some in the empirical studies and some in other chapters, and consists of four sections considering lexical, syntactic, phonological and cognitive perspectives. The volume provides a wealth of studies on the influence of Chinese on the acquisition of English but also includes studies involving Finnish, French, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Spanish, Swedish and Tamil. It will be of great interest to researchers and students working in the areas of crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition, language pedagogy and psycholinguistics.

Liming Yu is Professor Emeritus, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China and President of the China Educational Linguistics Association. His research interests have focused on language transfer in second language acquisition, the disciplinary nature of second language acquisition and theory and practice in bilingual education. He has published extensively, including Language Transfer in Language Learning (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press).

Terence Odlin is an emeritus faculty member of Ohio State University, USA. He continues to pursue his long-standing interest in language transfer, including relevant aspects of translation theory. He is the author of numerous publications on the subject, including New Perspectives on Transfer in Second Language Learning (co-edited with Liming Yu, 2016, Multilingual Matters).