An Empirical Study On Help Students To Aviod Negative First Language Transfer In English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Currently, the Grade12students have already acquired some basic languageknowledge and abilities, but their writing is not satisfactory. There are so many sortsof errors in students’ English writings, such as the misuse of vocabularies andgrammar, and also the disagreement in discourses.The current research is based on the studies of Middle school English writingteaching both in China and abroad, error analysis theories and mother tonguelanguage transfer. The author first collected240writing samples of120students inGrade12,and then analyzed their errors according to the mother tongue languagetransfer theories instead of limiting herself to the methods of traditional grammaranalysis. The author analyses all the samples and at the same time uses interviews tocommunicate with students, thus finding out that inter-language errors andintra-language errors are the main errors of students writing, especially inter-languageerrors, which results from the negative language transfer of mother tongue. So, basedon the finding, the author has divided her120students into two classes to doresearches in four months. In the control class, the author uses traditional methods toteach writing, while in the experiment class the author mainly uses four teachingstrategies, namely,1) Strengthening grammar teaching;2)Putting English reading andwriting together3)Laying stress on differences between Chinese and English;4)Imitating writing. These measures and approaches have some positive effects in thepractical English writing teaching, so there is an obvious decrease in students’ writingerrors. Students writing levels have been improved.The result of this thesis research shows that when senior high school studentswrite articles by using their target language, their mother tongue and presentknowledge level will have an effect on their writings, but this kind of phenomenon isquite common because students’ target language learning is partly based on theirmother tongue. Therefore, if teachers are willing to analyze students’ errors carefullyaccording to mother tongue language transfer theories and then use appropriateteaching methods in the process of teaching, it will be of great effect and importanceto improving students’ writing abilities and levels.