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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH — a b c d e f 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. e ( ( ( ( ( ( wwe 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 languages 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, negative 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 pattern 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 + 28 +
