An Empirical Study On Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Senior High School Students’ English Writing And The Corresponding Strategies

Nearly half a century of linguistic research has shown that the phenomenon of language transfer is unavoidable,and it does affect the second language acquisition in some ways(Ellis,1994).In the process of the second language learning and teaching,the second language writing has become one of the major difficulties.Due to the differences between English and Chinese languages,as well as the differences of the thinking pattern and expression,the senior high school students have obvious traces of negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing,which has become one of the main obstacles to improve the their English writing.On the basis of reviewing the relevant theories of language transfer,this paper adopts an empirical research method to study the writing of the grade two,fourth senior high school in Ningdu.In the study,two classes with relatively balanced performance were selected as research subjects,and drafted the experimental class is12 class and the control class is class 10.In the experimental class,teaching strategies related to the transfer of mother tongue were adopted,and the control class still adopted traditional teaching methods.The time of the experiment lasted for 11 weeks.The two English compositions from the middle term examination and the final examination were used as the pre-test and the post-test respectively.Before the experiment,a related questionnaire survey was conducted to understand students’ understanding of negative transfer of their mother tongue.After the experiment,the data collected in pre-test and post-test were analyzed by SPSS software,including group statistics analysis,independent sample T test,paired sample T test and correlation coefficient analysis to verify whether the new teaching strategies can promote the improvement of students’ writing level.The research results show that the new teaching strategies can really improve students’ English writing performance.The common errors in high school students’ English writing can be divided into interlingual errors and intralangual errors,throughthe statistics and analysis of the errors found in the sample of the students’ composition.Interlanguage errors are the main cause of negative translation errors in the mother tongue,which are mainly reflected in three levels,namely lexical,syntactical and discourse.And the lexical level is the most serious in the negative transfer.The main reasons for mother tongue transfer can be analyzed from the following three aspects.Firstly,the big differences in cultures and thinking patterns between English and Chinese,English belongs to Indo-European language family,Chinese is Sino-Tibetan language family,and there are great differences in the way of thinking.Secondly,under the influence of linguistic distance between English and Chinese,the distance between mother tongue and target language,and the complexity of English itself,the high school students are greatly influenced by the negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing.Thirdly,students’ learning strategies,students will subjectively apply the method of learning their mother tongue to the learning of target language during their process of learning English.Finally,the author puts forward the limitations of this paper and some suggestions for the future research.