Effect Of Language Transfer On English Writing By Chinese Students

Language transfer has been a controversial issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and language teaching for at least a century. After experiencing three periods, the perspective of language transfer study shifted from a behaviorist framework to a cognitive framework. Now, linguistic researchers have a better and more comprehensive understanding of language transfer. The importance of Kellerman's prototypicality and psychotypology theory lies in its theory value. Prototypicality based on markedness theory influences what learners are prepared to risk transferring and their psychotypology governs what is actually transferred in performance. Markedness theory offers the theoretical basis and research direction to the research of L1 transfer in L2 acquisition.This thesis explores language transfer in Chinese students' English writing on the basis of prototypicality, psychotypology, markedness theory, and the analysis focuses on lexis, especially on sentence and discourse level. The findings indicate that Chinese ESL students possess some certain perceptions about language distance because of their certain cultural background, which can influence their English learning. Meanwhile, Chinese ESL students intend to think in Chinese in the process of writing, it is the main factor that leads to the transfer of stylistic conventions that they have learned in their native language (NL) and culture into their English writing. On the other hand, the students' English proficiency and writing process are closely related to the amount of language transfer. And almost all the overuse and avoidance of words and syntactic items go with the principle that similarity between native language and target language (TL) makes learning easier while difference more difficult. The degree of markedness of words and syntactic structures in both NL and TL and the frequency of using them in TL will work together in language transfer. Both the overuse and avoidance may secure the number of errors and yet may also affect the variety and fluency of the students' writing. The analysis at the discourse level is carried out at four aspects: thesis development, topic sentence, and cohesion inside a paragraph and between paragraphs. The findings show that the students' EFL writing reflects the features of Chinese discourse mode.The current research discusses some pedagogical implications for the EFL learning and teaching. EFL teachers should raise the consciousness of cross-cultural influence, make students get full aware of the similarities and differences between Chinese and English, and help them to think in English, which provides shortcuts for Chinese EFL learners on their way learning English.The research methods employed in the research are: collecting samples, questionnaires and interviews. And SPSS software package is used for the research on quantitative analyses of the data.