Investigations And Analyses Of L1 Transfer In The EFL Writing By Chinese Students

Language transfer has been a key issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and language teaching for at least a century. Within the last few decades, however, its importance has been reassessed several times. Based on the chronological clues of the reassessment of the significance of language transfer, this paper will start with a review of the related research in the past decades. Then it will focus its attention on the transfer phenomena that are prevalent in Chinese EFL writing by students from several senior middle schools and colleges. Three major questions will be investigated and discussed in this paper: 1) At what level is the influence of the learners' first language evident in the EFL writing? 2) To what extent does learners' first language influence their English learning? 3) For what reasons does first language transfer occur in terms of linguistic features of the learners' interlanguage performance? It is found that Chinese EFL students' reliance on their mother tongue is greatly determined by the degree of markedness of certain linguistic structures. Besides, learners' way of acquiring English vocabulary, their knowledge about cross-linguistic differences between English and Chinese, and their writing strategies are also found to play a part in their reliance on their mother tongue in EFL compositions. Finally, this paper also works out some pedagogical implications for the EFL learning and teaching in China. It is suggested that some learning strategies and contrastivc studies of English and Chinese should be stressed in English teaching and learning.In addition, the research methods employed in the research are questionnaires and interviews. And SPSS software package is also used in the research for quantitative analyses of the data.