An Analysis Of Mother Tongue Interference At The Syntactic Level In Chinese Learners' English Writings

Mother tongue plays an undeniable role in the process of second language acquisition. Mother tongue transfer is classified into positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer, which facilitates the acquisition of L2, occurs when an L1 pattern is identical with, or similar to, a target language. Negative transfer occurs especially when there are differences between the learners' native language and the target language. In other words, differences between the two languages create learning difficulties which frequently result in errors.Based on Contrastive Analysis (CA) and Interlanguage theories, the author of the present thesis aims to make an analysis of negative transfer in Chinese learners' English writings at the syntactic level, and to putforward some feasible solutions to negative transfer in their writings.After making a detailed analysis of the differences between Englishand Chinese at the syntactic level, a conclusion is drawn that these differences prove to be a negative factor for learners' interlanguage, causing many of the problematic linguistic forms in their writings. The fact that Chinese is a typical analytic language while English remains possessive of some features of a synthetic language is the key to most of the differences between the two languages at the syntactic level. The passive is expressed by different lexical means and various syntactic structures between the two languages. S-V concord is a governing...