An Investigation And Countermeasures On Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Junior High School Students’ Writing

Writing is a comprehensive embodiment of language knowledge, which can fully reflect the learners’ language level. More and more teachers and students have paid attention to writing that is an important output skill. Because English and Chinese belong to different language families, there are a lot of differences between them. So negative transfer of mother tongue inevitably impacts on junior high school students’ English learning, which is particularly likely to cause errors in the junior high school students’ English writing. The research results obtained at home and abroad show that negative transfer of mother tongue exists in the process of writing.Based on the relevant theories and research findings of Second Language Acquisition, this thesis has carried out a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis towards errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue. The subjects for the study are 240 students from Grade 3 students in three different levels of junior high schools of Liaocheng. Two approaches have been adopted in the research. They are the questionnaire and the writing assignment. As the statistics from the tests has further proved that junior high school students are apt to be interfered by their mother tongue in their English writing. The author uses the method of case analysis to analyze the typical types of errors and the causes of these errors from English writing habits, lexical and syntactic aspects. This study aims at exploring the effective ways for the junior high school students to overcome negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing. The purpose of the research is to promote the current junior high school English writing teaching and improve the level of junior high school students’ English writing.This thesis is made up of the following five parts. The first part, briefly introduces the background and the purpose of the research. Then the significance of this research in practical English writing teaching is discussed. At last, the organization of the research is listed. The second part is literature review, which covers the definition of language transfer, the historical development of language transfer and theories related to language transfer. The third part is the main part of this paper. Firstly the subjects of this research are introduced. Then the procedures of two kinds of research methods-- questionnaire and the sample writings are specified. The author collects and analyzes the data. The fourth part introduces enlightenment and countermeasures on junior high school English writing teaching. The fifth part summarizes the findings of the research and discusses limitations of this research and the suggestions for further research. The author hopes that the research can serve as a modest spur to induce someone to come forward with his valuable contributions.