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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH
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positive transfer, associated with facilitation of learning;
negative transfer (interference), involving difficulty of learning;
the use of L1-based strategies;
avoidance: inhibition of transfer and L1-based strategies;
time taken to acguire a pattern or item;
ease/difficulty of recall under pressure.
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2.4.1 Positive transfer
Positive transfer may occur where L1 and L2 structures or items are similar.
This state of affairs may have a facilitative effect on acquisition: the learner’s
L1 will actually help the learner to learn the given L2 structure or item and to
progress more rapidly along the universal route of SLA.
For example, due to positive transfer, Hungarians will have no difficulty
with English word order in noun phrases containing adjectives: in both lan¬
guages the adjective comes before the noun:
three red apples — harom piros alma
Difficulty and interference may occur when Hungarian learners are faced
with languages in which the adjective comes after the noun. In this case, neg¬
ative transfer may result in interference errors:
három piros alma — *trois rouges pommes
Positive transfer has received less attention in SLA research than negative
transfer, but Ringbom (1992, see Chapter 3) provides conclusive evidence that
it plays a major role in language acquisition.
2.4.2 Negative transfer
Negative transfer, or L1 interference, even though its effect is not as direct as
it was supposed to be in the halcyon days of contrastive analysis, does, under
certain conditions, play a significant role in the genesis of errors, and may lead
to overt or covert errors, difficulty of acquisition, or slower acquisition. The
sources of negative transfer, structural and/or semantic contrasts, may be
responsible for learners’ uncertainty and increased reliance on L1 patterns
under time pressure, and increased amounts of time needed to acquire a pat¬
tern or an item, or indeed, the L2 as a whole. Just recall that Hungarian, which
is structurally related to Finnish, is much easier for Finns than for English
people. In the U.S., the Foreign Service Institute has created a scale, called
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