Language transfer is one of the central questions in second language acquisition (SLA) study. It claims that learners' the native language (NL) or first language (L1) will make great impacts, either promoting or hindering, on their second language (L2) acquisition, i.e. positive transfer and negative transfer. The issue has been widely concerned and researched in such relative fields as language education and psychological study during the past years. It is far beyond the scope of this paper to discuss it thoroughly since the scope of L1 influence is so wide that it affects almost all linguistic subsystems. Instead, this paper aims to focus on how the Chinese language facilitates Chinese learners' English lexical acquisition. Some suggestions on how to make use of the positive aspects is provided at the end of the paper for practical purpose.
Though China's present situation in English language teaching is quite favorable,some problems are still very outstanding.It seems that the communicative competence of Chinese students is not that satisfactory.The Communicative Language Teaching(CLT) approach,which regards"communicative competence"as the goal of language teaching,is becoming more and more popular in China's English language teaching.This paper shows that the CLT approach does work in improving students' communicative competence to some degree,through reviewing relevant literature on this approach.However,it is not a panacea to solve all the problems occurring in students' communicative competence for it also has some weak points.Several suggestions were proposed to enhance students' grammatical competence as well as the communicative block due to cultural differences.It is also advisable for teachers to be as flexible as possible in choosing the teaching techniques and adding whichever input needed to effectively achieve the main goal of making students both grammatically accurate and communicatively proficient.
