A Study Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer On Vocabulary In Senior High School Students' English Writings

In second language acquisition studies,the influence of mother tongue negative transfer on foreign language learning has been a hot issue.For most of the Chinese students,the phenomenon of mother tongue negative transfer exists in many aspects of their English learning,especially in English writing.And English writing is considered as the most difficult part by high school students.The errors in English writings are mainly caused by the negative transfer of mother tongue.Based on this,many researches have proved that negative transfer of mother tongue surely exists in students' writings,and these researches have focused on the influence of mother tongue negative transfer on the vocabulary level,syntactic level and discourse level,while few studies have focused solely on the influence on the vocabulary level.Therefore,the thesis focuses on the negative transfer of mother tongue on vocabulary level in senior high school students' English writings.The following are the two research questions.The first question is what are the main kinds of vocabulary errors influenced by mother tongue negative transfer in senior high school students' English writings.The second question is what are the causes of these errors.Based on the contrastive analysis theory,error analysis theory and interlanguage theory,a thorough analysis is conducted on the vocabulary errors as well as the causes related to mother tongue negative transfer in students' English writings.The participants are 110 students from Yantai No.3 Senior High School and their compositions from the mid-term examination.The research instruments include textual analysis,questionnaire and interview.Firstly,the English compositions from the mid-term exam are collected for error analysis,then questionnaires and interviews are conducted to explore the causes of these errors.All the collected data are processed by Microsoft Office Excel 2010.According to the analysis,the research draws the following conclusions: firstly,vocabulary errors caused by mother tongue negative transfer in senior high schoolspeech,word meaning,collocation and morphological structure.These errors can be further divided into thirteen subcategories.Secondly,the causes of these errors are as follows: students' attitude towards English learning,students' habits of vocabulary learning,the difference between English and Chinese and the limitations of English learning environment.Finally,based on the results of this research,some pedagogical implications are provided for English teaching in senior high schools,such as increasing language input,attaching importance to the differences between Chinese and English,treating students' errors caused by mother tongue negative transfer properly and enhancing students' vocabulary learning.It is the author' hope to help teachers improve the teaching quality and avoid the influence of mother tongue negative transfer on senior high school students' English learning through the research.