An Investigation Of Passive Voice Errors In Junior Middle School Students’ English Writing From The Perspective Of Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue

The level of English writing is considered to be able to represent students’ comprehensive use of the language.The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2017 Edition)clearly stated that students should form preliminary comprehensive language use ability through English learning,and put forward five levels of different requirements for writing skills.The English learning process of junior middle school students is often affected by various factors.Among them,negative transfer of mother tongue has always been a major element.As one of the most important items in English syntax,the passive voice in English has many differences from that in Chinese.Due to the negative transfer of mother tongue and other factors,English passive voice has always been a big grammatical problem for Chinese learners,even some advanced English learners can not fully grasp it.The passive voice errors in English writing of junior middle school students in China cannot be easily ignored.Therefore,the contrastive analysis theory,error analysis theory and interlanguage theory are used in this paper to investigate the passive voice errors in junior middle school students’ English writing from the perspective of negative transfer of mother tongue.This study will specifically answer the following questions:1.What types of passive voice errors do junior middle school students make in English writing?How does negative transfer of mother tongue affect them?2.Are there any differences in passive voice errors made by students with different writing levels?If yes,what are they?3.Analyzed from the perspective of negative transfer of mother tongue,what are the reasons for the differences?In order to get answers to the above research questions,the author analyzed the English essays of 202 students in the third,grade of a junior middle school,and distributed 202 questionnaires to investigate the influence of negative transfer of mother tongue on the use of passive voice in writing.The collected data were analyzed by SPSS 23.0.In view of the above research problems,the following conclusions can be drawn.First,there are four types of passive voice errors in junior middle school students writing,which are:(1)Inadequate Usage of Passive Voice,(2)Overuse of Passive Voice,(3)Misused Passive on Participle and(4)Misuse of Tenses.Second,students with different writing levels do have difference in passive voice errors in their writing.The numbers of passive voice errors made by the high and low level groups have significant differences.Moreover,the frequencies of inadequate usage and overase of passive voice are also different.Thirdly,the above differences are mainly caused by the negative transfer of mother tongue,which results in the different mastery and cognition levels of students with different writing skills in English passive voice.Based on the above research results,the author puts forward some constructive suggestions from two aspects:teachers’ teaching of passive voice writing and students’ learning of passive voice.It is hoped to provide references for junior middle school English writing teaching and passive voice teaching.And it will contribute to further teachers’understanding of students’ acquisition rules of passive voice.