Negative Transfer Of Native Language In English Writing Of Chinese Non-English Major College Students

Transfer is a common phenomenon in foreign language learning. It results from the similarities and differences between a target language and any other language that has been previously acquired. The research in this thesis is undertaken to explore the relation between native language transfer and the English writings by Chinese non-English major college students. This thesis lists manifestations of language transfer and puts emphasis on making a contrastive study of the different characters between Chinese and English while analyzing the various errors in Chinese students'English writings caused by the negative transfer of Chinese at the levels of substance, lexis, syntax and discourse as well as Chinglish expression.Sixty second-grade non-English major students in Chongqing University are the subjects in the study of this thesis. They are divided into basic and advanced groups in accordance with their different proficiency of English and whether they have passed CET4. Through the quantitative and qualitative study that involves analysis of the sample writings and the questionnaire plus interviews about their knowledge of the differences in English and Chinese and their writing strategy in the process of producing an English composition, we find in the study that the learners have actually vague information in the dissimilarities in the two languages and they are influenced consciously or unconsciously by native language transfer in the process of English writing. Negative influence of native language (NL) at the levels of substance, lexis, syntactic and discourse occurs in the sample compositions made by almost all the college students with different levels of proficiency at the target language (TL). Chinglish expression is also an inconvenient truth. The study also evidences that as the language learners'comprehensive knowledge of the target language increases, negative transfer will decrease to some degree. To be specific, the occurrence in each type of error exist in the compositions of basic group and the percentage of them who produce each type of error are higher than those in advanced group. What's more, advanced group don't make so simple or silly mistakes as basic group.On the basis of the above study and analysis, it seems impractical to erase negative transfer in the learners'L2 (second language) acquisition, so corresponding certain strategies are put up to help achieve the purpose of avoiding negative transfer and to promote target language acquisition and teaching as well.