Analysis Of Negative Transfer Errors In Non-English Majors’ Oral Performance

Human’s language learning aims at communicating with the others, while one of themost effective instruments for communicating is speaking. Compared to the other three basicskills of English learning, listening, writing and reading, speaking is more complicated anddifficult to master. During the communication with the others, Chinese students tend to beinterfered by errors. Negative transfer of mother tongue, as one of the sources causing errors,attracts much attention of scholars and teachers nowadays. Under the influence of negativetransfer, students can’t speak good English by using English knowledge in daily life. In recentyears, researches mainly focus on studying the performance and reasons of negative transferin English majors’ and senior school students’ oral English from angle of theory. Nonethelessthese researches rarely involve negative transfer in non-English majors’ oral English and lackrelated empirical studies.Based on the relative theories about language transfer, this paper analyzes how negativetransfer impacts non-English majors’oral English with real cases. The author collects theverbal data of sixty-nine non-English majors selected from Qiqihaer University randomly byconducting an oral English test which originally spring from IELTS. The written formtranscribed from the verbal data is analyzed by the means of error analysis and contrastiveanalysis.This paper focuses on studying the impact of negative transfer on non-English majorsspeaking English performance. And it carries on the exploration regarding how to reduce theimpact of negative transfer errors and improve oral English teaching in class based on relativetheories. Follows are the results:1) When learners communicating with the others, errors caused by language transfer takea significant percentage of all the errors and can be found in a variety of levels whichindicates that language transfer acts as an inevitable force having an impact on students’acquisition of oral English.2) Language transfer errors mainly distribute in the level of lexis, syntax and pragmaticswhich on the decrease. In another word, learners are deeply affected by language transfer inwords selection.3) On the level of lexis, learners are easy to make language transfer errors in notionalwords.4) While on the level of syntax, most language transfer errors are found in the tense.Under the impact of mother tongue, learners tend to ignore this in actual communication.5) On the level of pragmatics, although there are few language transfer errors, attentionshould be paid to these errors as well. Since the aim of language learning is communication,having a better understanding of the culture of the target language can cause unnecessaryobstacles.The paper attempts to reveal some pedagogical implications after data analysis from three aspects, setting up second language system, fluently using language rules and formingcommunicating ability in the hope of bringing the enlightenment to oral English teaching andimproving Chinese students’ speaking English. Lastly, shortages of this paper andsuggestions for further studies are also provided.