Professor Terence Odlin from Ohio State Universitywas invited to deliver a speech on language transfer at the National Key Research Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics on May 13th, 2014.
In his talk, Professor Odlindid a thorough survey of the notions of transfer and contrastive analysis from a historical perspective for the purpose of providing fresh insights on the understanding of the nature of transfer and related teaching strategies. According to him,languagetransfer, contrastive analysis and cross-linguisticinfluenceare the commonest termsused to describe the role ofthe native language (or otherpreviouslylearned languages) in theacquisition of anew one. For the skepticism about ideas associatedwiththese terms, however,they need clarifying. Contrastive analysis, for example, hasambiguitiesand other problems thatreaders oftheSLAliteratureshouldbeawareofwhen thinking abouttransfer. In this light, Prof. Odlinconsidered these notionsby examining the use of related terms in several other languages where the notion of transfer may be borrowed and by looking back tothe history of transfera centurybefore the termcontrastive analysis hypothesis (Lado, 1957)came intouse. The survey brought to light thatcertain relatedproblemsnowadayslikewiseengagedthinkerslong ago; amongsuch problems are linguisticrelativity,multilingualism,and variation.
The lecture proved an interesting and inspiring one. In this lecture, Prof. Odlin not only helped us gain a good understanding of language transfer, but also deeply impressed us with his rigor in doing academic research and his immense erudition in many other fields of learning.
