Negative Transfer Of Native Language In Chinese College Students' EFL Writing

The transfer of native language is a phenomenon that cannot be denied in theacquisition of a learner's second language due to the fact that the learner has had arather developed prior L1 system in his mind. The author, through her five-yearteaching practice, has noticed that the phenomenon of native language transfer can beclearly traced in Chinese college students'EFL writing. The transfer is dichotomizedinto positive transfer and negative transfer. The dissertation focuses on negativetransfer, which is shown in the numerous errors that the students committed.A study, based on the theories of language transfer, Error Analysis (EA),Contrastive Analysis (CA) and Interlanguage (IL), is carried out by collecting thecompositions written by 120 sophomores in Xi'an Electronic Science and TechnologyUniversity and North China Institute of Water Conservancy and Hydroelectric Power.The errors in the selected 96 compositions are identified and those resulting fromChinese are discussed in detail. These interlingual errors are categorized intosubstance, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic errors with examples provided. The studyshows that negative transfer of native language is one of the major sources of theerrors, and the main reason is the differences between the two languages. Thus, somepedagogical implications are drawn that it is of great significance for English teachersin China to apply contrastive analysis and error analysis to their teaching.The dissertation enriches the study of language transfer. It is hoped that it may be ofhelp to both English learners in China to increase their writing ability and improvetheir language proficiency and the English teachers in China in tackling students'writing errors and making adjustments in their teaching methods.