Reverse transfer from L3 French to L2 English in the domain of tense/aspect among L1 Mandarin Chinese speakers

Abstract

Focusing on the domain of tense and aspect, this study investigated L3 > L2 transfer among a group of L1 Mandarin Chinese/L2 English/L3 French speakers (n = 22). Three elicitation tasks (a grammatical error correction task, a grammaticality judgement-correction task, and a cloze task) were carried out to examine their English language use. Their performance was then compared with that of a bilingual control group consisting of L1 Mandarin Chinese/L2 English speakers (n = 22). The results revealed that no significant L3 > L2 reverse transfer effect was observed among this group of learners at the receptive level. Nonetheless, at the productive level, they exhibited unique language use patterns that distinguished them from their bilingual peers. Specifically, two notable observations emerged: firstly, they produced significantly more perfect forms (i.e., present perfect, past perfect) with achievement verbs; and secondly, they showed a tendency to misuse the past progressive tense with activity verbs. This study argues that these learners’ non-target use of English tenses can be attributed to the influence of their L3 French. Furthermore, the learners’ L1 and L3 seemed to have a joint influence on their L2 English use. The findings indicate a clear influence of the learners’ L3 French on their use of past tense morphology in L2 English. More importantly, this reverse transfer (Cheung et al., 2011; Cook, 2003; Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008; Tsang, 2017) seemed to occur not only at the morphological level but also at the semantic level. In light of these findings, the implications for existing models of transfer are discussed, and directions for future research endeavours are outlined.