Investigating The Effect Of L1 Transfer On L2 Writing Among Senior High School Students

Writing is a way to express emotions and convey information.As Vygotsky(1999)contended,thought and speech are the essence of human consciousness and writing is speech in thought and image(James,2001).When high school students who speak Chinese as mother tongue learn other languages,their use of mother tongue and the corresponding way of thinking are bound to impact the learning of the target language,and English writing is no exception.This dissertation uses transfer theory,interlanguage theory,and comparative analysis theory as the theoretical framework to conduct a survey study among 106 students in two classes of the freshman at a high school in Jiangxi Province,aiming to explore the impact of the L1 transfer on the second language writing of high school students.The duration of this study is one semester,and the research tools used are English writing tests and questionnaire survey.The purpose of this study is to answer the following two research questions:(1)What is the impact of the L1 transfer on students’ second language writing? Which aspect of the impact is the most significant?(2)In which ways is the L1 transfer related to the participants’ second language proficiency? This study adopted quantitative and qualitative research methods.On the one hand,the author used questionnaires to initially analyze the influence of the first language in the second language writing of high school students from three dimensions based on the statistics.On the other hand,the author specifically analyzed writing samples which were assumed to have affected by students’ native language from the aspects of vocabulary,syntax and discourse.In order to answer the second question,the author divided the participants into high and low English proficiency groups according to their scores of writing samples in this investigation.Then,the author used SPSS statistical software to do an independent sample T-test on the basis of the data,which could analyze the significant correlation between English proficiency and the native language transfer that occurs in the writing aspects of vocabulary,syntax and discourse.The results show that the mother tongue transfer influenced high school students’ English writing,including students’ vocabulary,syntax and discourse.Among them,mother tongue has the most significant influence on high school students’ syntax in English writing.Those impacts have both positive and negative sides in their English learning.In addition,the research data indicating that there is a close relation between native language transfer and second language proficiency in English writing.Students with high English proficiency are less affected by the negative transfer of their mother tongue.Students with low English proficiency are greatly affected by the positive and negative transfer of their mother tongue.This research aims to enrich the current research on English writing pedagogy,extend the research scope of mother tongue transfer theory,and provide certain reference value and practical significance for improving students’ English writing level and promoting the quality of writing teaching in high school English teachers.Based on the above research,this paper proposes the following teaching suggestions:Firstly,foreign language teachers should pay attention to explaining the cultural differences between Chinese and Western cultures to help students correctly understand the cultural differences in the process of English writing instruction.Secondly,expand the target language input of students in and out of class,such as reading the original works and quoting sentences.Finally,students are encouraged to output language as much as possible,such as keeping English diaries or talking with foreigners.