A Study Of Negative Language Transfer In College Students' Writings From The Cultural Perspective

Language and culture are closely related with each other and they are inseparable. Language, as a vehicle of culture, is as well culture's manifestation. The relationship between language and culture is intricate and complicated, not only because language is the carrier of culture but also culture is the rail of language. As for a foreign language learner, learning a new language implies the acquaintance of a new culture, and vice versa. As a result, as a complete linguistic teaching style, English teaching should integrate culture with linguistic elements.Transfer, as an important notion in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), is originally a basic concept in psychology. In psychology, it refers to"the phenomenon of previous knowledge being extended to the area of new knowledge, i.e. the influence which the learning or remembering of one thing has on the learning and remembering of another thing."(Sajavaara, 1986) It is Whitney who first introduced this notion into the area of linguistics. Language transfer can be classified into positive, negative and zero transfer. As for the definition of positive transfer, it is the transfer that helps or facilitates language learning in another situation, and may occur when both the native language and the target language have the same form. Negative transfer, also known as interference, is one that interferes with language learning in another later situation. Specifically, it refers to the use of native language patterns or rules which leads to an error or inappropriate form in the target language. Zero transfer refers to those situations that no transfer occurs. How to utilize the positive transfer and avoid negative transfer is of great significance in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). After a careful detection of this subject, the author finds that most papers were written from a narrow linguistic aspect. Therefore, aiming to improve college students'English writing, the author tries to analyze the negative transfer from the cultural perspective. With the guidance of the theory of Language Transfer, Culture Transfer, Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage, the author carries out a research, which lasts for five months, on the students'writing tasks. The adopted methods in this research, like writing tasks, questionnaire and interview, are well-designed. Based on the research, the author has not only discovered that students are deficient in writing because of the interference of their mother tongue but also explored the reason for language transfer, which is cultural difference. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to find out the difficulties students faced and provide possible solutions, and the efforts in searching the sources of negative transfer from the cultural perspective and avoiding negative transfer efficiently are as well the focal points of this thesis.Although in this thesis the author manages to study the current situation from the cultural perspective, it is still insufficient and further research should be conducted by linguists and experts in this area.