A Study On Chinese Negative Transfer In Senior Middle School Students' Writing

It seems that the negative transfer of Chinese is complicated in Chinese seniormiddle school students'writing. It has bothered the teachers and students too muchfor a long period of time. So it is urgent for the teachers and researchers to pay moreattention to this problem and try to solve it in English writing process. This study aimsat analyzing the writing compositions of Senior high school students, to find theaspects of the negative transfer in the English writing, to find the most influentialerrors caused by Chinese negative transfer, to what extend Chinese negative transferaffects the accuracy of language use in a written text, and try to find some effectivesolutions to this problem.The subjects in the study are 80 Senior high school students in Grade Three inBeijing HePing Middle School. 230 compositions were chosen from more than 400situational compositions of different exams (in order to make the classificationclearer). During the study, one of the most obvious approaches of analyzinginter-language is to study the errors of the learners (Error Analysis). In addition, inorder to get further information of the writing process and the difficulty which iscommon for the students during the English writing, questionnaire was also collected.The results of this study showed that: 1) According to the questionnaire, more than60% of the students think in the Chinese way first before writing an Englishcomposition, so the negative transfer of Chinese is serious in Chinese senior middleschool students'writing.2) 84% students think they have not read enough in English,that is , their language input is too limited. 78% students pay less attention to the usage and collocation of phrases.3) As for the negative transfer from Chinesegrammar on morphemic level, lexical level, syntactic level and the level of contextduring the process of English writing, the students trend to make more mistakes onthe lexical level and the syntactic level . 4) In order to avoid Chinese negative transfer,contrastive teaching is a must for the students to know the difference between Chineseexpression and English expression .5) In the teaching process, enough input isnecessary for the students to experience English and to acquire their foreign language.Though study here has classified the transfer errors of the middle school students'writing, there are still some limitations. First, the text is just for the situational ones,which is a little bit limited. Second, the study pays too much attention to learner'serrors and fails to provide a complete picture of learner language. The author of thepresent study believes that further study is needed to explore other reasons of theerrors in the students'English writing.