Cross-linguistic Transfer among University Students in Malaysia

Abstract

Not many people know what crosslinguistic transfer is. Not only that, we may not even know what is the effect of this theory. In this report, we will demonstrate the crosslinguistic transfer that occurred among university students in Malaysia. The first objective that we want to achieve for this research is the positive and negative cross-linguistic transfers faced by university’s students in learning English in writing. The second objective is the factors that contribute to negative cross-linguistic tran sfer in studying English and how to minimize the negative cross linguistic transfer. There are two methods on how to find the result where we organize oral interviews and writing tasks. The results of this research in terms of students' positive transfer is that they are transmitting similar linguistic features from L1 to L2 while for the negative is the students are integrating L1 and L2 grammar concepts that are different for both languages. The factors that contribute to negative cross-linguistic transfer in studying English is they tend to mix language between Malay and English as they live in a multicultural society and they are also unaware of the cross linguistic transfer. So, we suggest that the teachers can minimize the cross-linguistic transfer by creating a fun but memorable teaching class.