Syntactic Transfer And English Composition Strategies In Senior High School

It is acknowledged that language is used to communicate, and writing calls for more communicative competence than other forms. So if EFL learners can express themselves properly, effectively or even wonderfully in English, they are successful learners in a sense.Composition is a most difficult task and painstaking work of the four basic skills in a language learning—listening, speaking, reading and writing (composition). And the school students'English compositions influenced by Chinese language is a knotty problem. This thesis, therefore, focuses on English composition teaching in senior high school. To deal with errors and failures in such compositions, the author employed the latest theories in transfer and contrastive linguistics, collected and analyzed errors in school students'compositions and developed an English-Chinese syntax contrast way of English composition teaching.This thesis consists of six parts.Part One reviews the related studies of transfer and contrastive analysis in order to lay a solid theoretical foundation for the solutions to the problems revealed in Part Two and Part Three. In Part Two a brief presentation is given on the current state of composition teaching in senior high schools. In Part Three a questionnaire about the present situation of composition teaching and writing is completed and analyzed. The examinees are from different senior high schools of five provinces. The findings through the analysis of the questionnaire are the main existing problems in senior high school composition teaching—lacking an effective composition teaching approach. Thus Part Four is to give a recommended solution—English-Chinese Syntax Contrast Composition Teaching, and in Part Six further correlative research is suggested.