The Influence Of The Mother Tongue's Negative Transfer On Senior School Students' English Writing And The Strategies

English teaching cultivates four communication skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), among which writing plays a key role, for it is a significant way of language output. Senior high school students can make comprehensive use of what they have learned to train and foster their language skills by writing. Additionally, teachers will make a better understanding of students' levels and competence in English by correcting their compositions, so as to find weak points of what students have learned and teach more efficiently.However, English writing is always neglected in senior high school English teaching. The reasons are rather complicated, but two are worth noting. One is that English writing is always neglected by high school teachers; the other is that what the students would like to express is far beyond what they have learned, so transfer appears resulting from the penetration of Chinese language thinking in the process of English writing. Transfer is a term which comes from cognitive psychology. Language transfer has positive and negative effects on foreign language learners. Positive transfer helps learners function effectively in the situation for which they have no previously acquired information. It enables learners to solve problems they have never seen before. When learning from one situation interferes with learning in another situation, this is referred to as negative transfer. Negative transfer is usually detrimental to learning. It is a fact that the Chinese language interferes in English writing under the influence of negative transfer, because senior high school students think there are Chinese counterparts to English lexicon, syntax and discourse, as long as they can translate it in the Chinese way of thinking. Even though the English writing of that type has few mistakes in spelling and grammar, it is not idiomatic at all, but full of strong traces of Chinese.This dissertation illustrates and analyzes the negative transfer in senior high school students' English writing in terms of lexicon, syntax and discourse, and what typical mistakes they make under the influence of this transfer. Based on the above analysis, it tries to put forward some strategies on eliminating negative transfer and realize the goal of improving the students' level and competence of English writing.