An Empirical Study On The Influences Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer In Senior High School Students’ Compositions

Language transfer means that second language learners unconsciously transfer their previously acquired language knowledge to the learning of target language. Language transfer contains positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer plays a pushing role in second language learning; while negative transfer has a serious impediment to second language learning. English and Chinese respectively belong to different language families. There are differences in the usage of lexicon, grammar, discourse, linking and culture. Chinese English learners tend to be interfered by Chinese thinking and expression. As a result, they make various kinds of errors.Writing is considered to be a formal text expression and is a good way to show learners’writing proficiency. As an English teacher for senior high school students, the author feels it an urgency to correct students’errors and improve their writing abilities every time seeing there are so many errors in their compositions because no lexical errors and grammatical errors are the most basic requirements in composition marking for university entrance examination. Therefore, the author attempts to chose and analyze the errors caused by mother tongue negative transfer in senior high school students’compositions. In this study, the author intends to answer the following questions:1. What are the general errors caused by mother tongue negative transfer at the levels of lexicon and grammar?2. What are the main reasons that mother tongue causes negative transfer for these errors?This study is carried out by referring to the classification of text error in Carl James’idea (2001) and making an analysis on30students’compositions through error analysis and contrastive analysis from the levels of lexicon and grammar so as to find out what are the general lexical errors, syntactic errors and morphological errors caused by mother tongue negative transfer. According to research results, lexical errors concerning mother tongue negative transfer contain misselecting word class, collocational errors, lexical redundancy, confusion negatives and positives and separating fixed phrases; syntactic errors concerning mother tongue negative transfer contain topic prominent transfer error, omitting sentence elements, literal translation(misordering sentence elements), and run-on sentences; morphological errors concerning mother tongue negative transfer contain disagreement between the subject and the predicate, errors in verbs tense, misusing the verb be and number errors of nouns. According to the final statistics, there are386errors in the30collected samples. Among these386errors,78errors belong to lexical errors, accounting for20.20%;148errors are syntactic errors, occupying38.34%, while160errors belong to morphological errors, accounting for41.45%.After analyzing the sample writings, the author finds the reasons for making these errors are complex. The main factors are as follows:firstly, there are great differences between English and Chinese in objective linguistic distance; secondly, there are differences between English and Chinese in cultures and thinking patterns; finally, students’own learning strategies generate mother tongue negative transfer.Although the author has made some achievements in this study, there are still some limitations in the present study. Such as, the research sample is not big enough; the classifications of errors are not clear and overall enough; the analysis about the factors of mother tongue negative transfer is not overall enough; the pedagogical implications may be a little difficult in the actual implementation.