A Study On Chinese Negative Transfer In Senior High School Students' English Writings Based On Error Analysis

Writing error is one of the major production errors that most language teacher may encounter in the language teaching process.Moreover,those errors pose a hard nut to crack for the students to acquire the language.The research is carried out to analyze the errors in Chinese senior school students' writing based on CA and EA to find the solution to the problem.The result from the investigation of 191 compositions from 107 students of the second year in senior school has justified that cross-linguistic influence is most dominant inferential factors for the errors in students' English writings.Therefore,the study mainly focuses on the analysis of negative transfer of L1 in Chinese students' writing,in which the errors are classified and presented at levels of substances,lexis,syntax,discourse and cultural perspective.The causes for negative transfer are involved as well.On the basis of the quantitative and qualitative analysis,the errors caused mainly by L1 transfer are investigated and analyzed to explore their distribution and frequency.It is found that the lexical and syntactic errors account for the most part of the percentage.In addition,questionnaire plus interview are also employed to further illustrate the results from the sample writings.The questionnaire is the investigation of the awareness of the occurrence and causes of negative transfer of Chinese in English writing from the perspective of the students,and it can provide supplementary illustration on those errors that indeed exist in students' learning but did not appear in the collected writings.In addition,the interview is conducted to help explain the sources of those writing errors from the teachers' perspective of view.The results confirm that the differences in language points,modes of expression and the ways of thinking cause confusions and difficulties to English writing for Chinese senior students.In consideration of the findings from the research,great efforts should have been made to seek implications for English teaching and learning in China,especially in senior high school.Therefore,through the study of transfer of mother language,the students,together with the teachers,can be guided to take notice of differences between Chinese and English as well as the factor of transfer in English learning and teaching,diminishing the influence of negative transfer and making good use of positive transfer of Chinese so as to improve the students' writing ability and enhance teaching.