A Study On Mother Tongue Transfer In High School Students’ English Grammar Learning

Language transfer is divided into positive transfer and negative transfer,which respectively promote and hinder second language acquisition.English grammar is the key content of high school English teaching,but the students are easily influenced by Chinese expression when they master and use grammar knowledge,which hinders the development of students’ English level.Therefore,how to help high school students to reduce the negative transfer and promote the positive transfer of English learning has become one of the major topics in the field of English teaching in China.The research subject of this paper is the students of the two classes of the Shandong Jigang Senior High School.They are in Class three and Class four,Grade 2.Based on the theory of contrastive analysis hypothesis,error analysis theory and interlanguage theory,combined with the reality of high school students’ English grammar learning,this paper analyzes the positive and negative transfer of mother tongue to English grammar learning.The research methods in this paper include literature research method,questionnaire survey method and corpus analysis method.First of all,through the literature research method,the author will sort out the basic theory of language transfer,including its connotation,characteristics and theoretical basis,in order to find out the theoretical basis for the research of this paper.This is the starting point of the research.Secondly,the questionnaires about the transfer of mother tongue are sent out to the respondent.The questionnaires are aimed at the grammar-based mother tongue transfer,and the statistics and analysis are carried out to know the students’ understanding of the mother tongue transfer and the basic situation of the mother tongue transfer in English grammar learning.Thirdly,the author collects the test papers of the respondents’ mid-term exams,conducts a corpus analysis of the students’ writings,and explores the impact of positive and negative transfer on English grammar learning.Finally,based on the analysis of the questionnaires and the results of the corpus analysis,the relevant suggestions for grammar teaching are proposed based on the transfer theory.There are three research questions:Q1: What’s the relationship between the errors in high school students’ English grammar learning and mother tongue transfer?Q2: What aspects are affected by negative mother tongue transfer in high school English grammar learning?Q3: What aspects are affected by positive mother tongue transfer in high school English grammar learning?The conclusion of the dissertation is as follows.On the one hand,the mother tongue has a certain negative transfer effect on English grammar learning.The negative transfer of mother tongue to grammar learning is reflected in the two aspects:morphology and syntax.Negative transfer in morphology mainly includes the misuse of articles,the misuse of countability of nouns,the misuse of case of nouns,the misuse of preposition and the misuse of part of speech.Negative transfer in syntax is mainly reflected in the misuse of subject-predicate agreement and the missing of component in sentences and the misuse of tense.On the other hand,the promotion of English grammar learning by mother tongue is also obvious.Firstly,the grammatical commonality of mother tongue and English is beneficial to learners’ learning of English.For example,the similarity of the syntactic structure of English and Chinese simple sentences is beneficial to mastering English sentence patterns.Secondly,when they are learning English grammar,high school students can quickly extract English words which have clear correspondence in Chinese meanings,which reduces the chance of error.The research still has many shortcomings.The number of subjects studied was small and the scope of the selection was narrow.Due to the above limitations,the accuracy of the research conclusions needs to be further verified.The author suggests that in-service teachers in secondary schools can use favorable conditions to further study the phenomenon of mother tongue transfer.