Mother Tongue Transfer In College English Writing

Mother tongue transfer has been a controversial issue in foreign language learning, and writing is always difficult for Chinese students as well as for teachers of English. The present thesis, which aims at exploring negative mother tongue transfer in non-English majors' writings, is desired to be of some help to both language teachers and language learners.This paper contains 6 chapters. It is organized as follows:The first chapter serves as an introduction to the study. Research background, significance and purpose of the study are presented in this chapter.The second chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical research literature relevant to this study. Four theories concerning transfer, including Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis, interlanguage research, and Transfer Analysis are explained in detail. And up-to-date research situation at home and abroad is reviewed herein.The third chapter is concerned with the research design. Six research questions are put forward. Subjects involved and the instruments employed in the study as well as data collection, classification and analysis procedures are introduced.In chapter four, by using qualitative and quantitative analysis, the author gets the results of the error distribution and discusses the sources of errors at various levels. Then the author finds out the variables that most significantly distinguish the high-score compositions from the low ones by using independent T-test. Finally, students' psychological cognitive process, especially the influence of mother tongue in their L2 writing process is analyzed by employment of think aloud method and a questionnaire on students' beliefs about language learning.