A Study On Syntactic Errors Caused By Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In High School Students' English Writing

As a language extensively utilized at home and abroad,English plays a significant role in College Entrance Exam.However,in China,since English learning is not in English learning context,it is often influenced by Chinese,especially in Chinese rural schools.Thus,students haven't laid a solid foundation of English and are not interested in English learning,English writing in particular.Syntactic errors due to native transfer take up a large percentage in English compositions.Although quantities of studies on syntactic transfer of native language have been conducted at home and abroad,there are few researches on syntactic errors in high school English writing,especially researches on the compositions of high school students in the countryside.Therefore,making use of transfer theory,iner language theory and error analysis,this author will collect and classify the syntactic errors due to language transfer in high school English writing and analyze the reasons of syntactic errors,and at last searches for effective teaching strategies that can reduce syntactic errors and overcome syntactic transfer.This experiment is conducted to explore three questions:a.What are the main syntactic errors in rural high school students' English writing?b.Why do these syntactic errors often appear in rural high school students' English writing?c.What teaching strategies should be employed by the author to reduce these syntactic errors in rural high school students' writing?The subjects of the experiment are 107 students belonging to two classes of the same level in Grade 2 of Pan Shan County High School.One class was chosen randomly as the controlled class and the other as the experimental class.The study includes a questionnaire and two writing tests(one is the pre test,the other is the post test)and quantitative research and qualitative research are both utilized in the study.The author will apply SPSS to make the outcome of the study more scientific and persuasive.The questionnaire is analyzed to learn about students' attitude towards English writing,syntactic errors in daily writing,writing habit and strategies.The author will make use of error analysis and inter language theory to collect and classify syntactic errors in the pre test and analyze these errors to find out the main reasons that cause such errors.Based on the findings,the controlled class will still follow the traditionalways of teaching,while the experimental class will adapt new teaching strategies to help students overcome syntactic transfer and reduce syntactic errors caused by negative transfer.After 16 weeks,the post test will be carried out and errors in the samples will be collected.The author analyzes the statistics collected in the pre test and post test to find out whether there will be significant differences between the statistics in the pre test and the post test.In the post test,if the average score of the compositions in the experimental class is higher than that in the controlled class and there's significant difference between them,it can be proved that the teaching strategies employed by the author can assist rural high school students to cut down syntactic errors due to negative transfer in English writing.