| According to language transfer theory, learners will inevitably be affected by the thinking pattern of mother tongue and the habit of using mother tongue. Language transfer is a kind of language phenomenon which refers to the language knowledge that has been mastered by the learners influences the acquisition of second language. Based on the effect of language transfer, we can divide language transfer into positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer does good to promote second language acquisition while negative transfer will interfere or obstruct the second language learning.Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, while English belongs to the Indo-European language family. Due to Chinese and English belong to two different language families, the language characteristics of the two languages are also quite different. There are great differences existing in the two languages in the way of thinking, cultural connotation and the use of grammar. For learners, negative transfer is mainly reflected in two aspects of culture and grammar. As for grammar, negative transfer of mother tongue manifests itself in different linguistic levels such as pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, semantics, pragmatics,discourse, etc. Despite the interference of negative transfer of mother tongue exists in all aspects of language during the process of high school students’ English learning, this kind of interference is especially obvious in syntactic level. The negative transfer of syntactic level restricts senior high school students’ English writing ability to a great degree.However, in recent years, researches on the negative transfer of mother tongue in the teaching mainly focus on pronunciation, listening and writing aspects. But the research on the negative transfer of mother tongue at syntactic level in English writing is few. Therefore, the author makes an empirical research on the phenomenon of negative transfer at syntactic level in English writing of senior high school students. The author tries to answer the following questions:1. What kinds of negative transfer at syntactic level often occur in senior high school students’ writing? What are the reasons?2. Is there any change in the degree of high school students’ dependence on negative transfer of mother tongue after the experiment?3. How to help students to overcome the interference of negative transfer of mother tongue in their English writing?Based on the theoretical basis of contrastive analysis, error analysis and inter-language theory, the author chooses two classes about 90 students in Gaizhou No.2 senior high school as the research subjects. Among them, one class as the experimental class, the other is the controlled class. In experimental class, the author uses the contrastive analysis method andexplains the syntactic differences between Chinese and English in class. At the same time, the author strengthens the syntactic exercises in experimental class. On the contrary, in the controlled class, the author still uses the traditional teaching method. The author conducts a systematic research on the phenomenon of negative transfer of mother tongue at syntactic level among the two classes by the three methods of writing test, questionnaire and interviews.Through the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis methods, the author finds that subject-predicate disagreement, Chinglish expression, multi-predicate, run-on sentences as well as wrong expression of the passive voice have higher error rates and these five types of syntactic errors are easy to be interfered by the negative transfer of mother tongue. The experiment result shows that the negative transfer of mother tongue can be overcome and high school students’ dependence degree on mother tongue strategy also can be changed. Finally, the author puts forward some strategies to reduce the interference of the negative transfer mother tongue at syntactic level and points out the limitations of the thesis as well as some suggestions for the future researchers. |
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