An Analysis Of Negative Mother Tongue Transfer On Syntax In Senior High School Students' English Writing

Mother tongue transfer is a phenomenon that cannot be neglected and denied in second language learning. An amount of researches indicate that it is necessary to consider the factor of language transfer if people want to make full explanation to the second language acquisition or foreign language learning phenomenon. Because foreign language learners have had a rather perfect mother tongue system, mother tongue's effect on the second language acquisition, especially the negative effect, is worthy to be researched carefully.We can observe mother tongue transfer very clearly in English writings written by Chinese students. After all, Chinese and English belong to different language families, so there are many differences on morphology, syntax and idiomatic expression between the two languages. This thesis focuses on the research and analysis of the syntactic negative transfer in high school students'English writing.Theoretical bases of this research are mainly Language Transfer Theory, Interlanguage Theory, Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis Theory, and the empirical part conducts data and corpus collection through methods such as questionnaire, composition sampling and syntactic test. Through the result analysis, we find that high school students rely on mother tongue strategies to a great extent. And there is a great number of syntactic negative transfer circumstances in their exercise compositions collected in this research and they mainly are:(1) attributive clause errors; (2) "there be" structure errors; (3) run-on sentences; (4) subject errors; (5) the omission of copula. Combined with the results of the questionnaires, the author summarizes the main causes of syntactic transfer errors in students'English writings:language distance, different thought patterns, lack of comprehensible input and lack of comparison between Chinese and English.This study puts forward some suggestions for language transfer researchers and English teachers:(1) making students understand negative transfer; (2) helping students to develop the English way of thinking; (3) intensifying contrasts between English and Chinese; (4) encouraging students to use proper dictionaries; (5) strengthening syntactic training; (6) treating the students'errors properly.Through researching the syntactic negative transfer phenomenon and discussing its causes, the writer hopes this research will give some inspirations to English education staffs'writing teaching in middle schools. How to adopt effective strategies and methods to promote positive transfer and avoid negative transfer and improve students' writing ability should be the ultimate aim for this kind of research. And the writer hopes this thesis can provide some references for the follow-up researchers who research the syntactic negative transfer phenomenon in English writing.