Effect Of Language Transfer On English Writingby ChineseStudents

From the beginning of 1980's on, language teachers and researchers paid increasing attention to the research of L2 writing. Of all the researches so far, studies on the relationship between thinking/planning in L2 and its impact on L2 writing performance are sadly lacking and the problem with those studies is that they are small-scaled and exploratory. So the influences of L1 planning/thinking on L2 writing are still a controversial problem. The present research will also deal with it and explore influences of intended L1 planning on L2 writing performance.Mother tongue transfer has been a controversial issue in foreign language learning, 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 thesis explores language transfer in Chinese students'English writing and the analysis focuses on lexis especially on sentence and discourse level.Based on the collection of the errors from 520 compositions of the students, the paper identifies some common errors and their frequency distributions show that the error frequency distribution. Chinese 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 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. 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.Through the qualitative error analysis, the paper discovers that the students'uses of verb tenses, plural forms of nouns, sentence structures and articles prepositions are liable to the affected by their mother tongue.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.