Negative Transfer Of Chinese On College Students' English Writings

In learning a foreign language, the learners' mother tongue or the first language (L1) would inevitably influence its learning. The influence of the L1 is called language transfer in linguistic research. And there are two kinds of transfer: positive transfer and negative transfer. The former can promote the learning process while the latter hinders it. The same is true to Chinese students' learning English. Due to the negative transfer of Chinese, errors occur in their writings in English.There is a close relationship between error analysis and language teaching, which has become one of the significant issues discussed by many linguists. A large amount of researches show that in the field of applied linguistics, we should take language transfer into consideration, especially mother tongue transfer. In the present study, we put our effort into the negative transfer of Chinese with the analysis of errors occurring in college students' English writing.Based on the researches of language transfer and error analysis, this study aims to investigate the negative transfer of Chinese on college students' English writings through the analysis of the errors occurring in 167 English compositions of sophomores, who major in English in Qufu Normal University. Four research questions were formulated to guide the study. They are: 1) What are the main problems in Chinese students' English writing? 2) In what aspects does the negative transfer of the mother tongue manifest? 3) What kinds of measures should we take to avoid the negative transfer? 4) And what pedagogical implications can we get from this study?This study mainly employed the qualitative approach, and the quantitative approach was also involved. Error analysis focused on the four main categories of errors—errors occurring at the level of lexicon, syntax, discourse, and thought patterns, and eighteen subcategories—1) errors in subject-predicate agreement; 2) errors in passive voice; 3) errors in tense; 4) errors in infinitives; 5)misuse of articles; 6)misuse of singular form and plural form of nouns; 7) errors in comparative degree and superlative degree; 8) omission and misuse of conjunctions; 9) errors in gerund and -ing form of verbs; 10) errors in the place of adverbial and attributive; 11) spelling errors; 12) Chinglish expressions; 13) redundant and improper words and collocations; 14) omission and misuse of possessive adjectives and pronouns; 15) negation errors; 16) errors in subjunctive mood; 17) errors in "there be" structure; 18) punctuation errors.The results show that Chinese does have interference on college students' writings in English. It mainly manifested in four aspects: lexicon, syntax, discourse and thought patterns. The analysis of error frequency shows: of the errors appearing in the learners' English writings, the percentage of those errors caused by Chinese interference is 46.2. Syntactic errors take the first place and those of tense and voice of verbs are of high frequency.The reason for this is that there are differences between English and Chinese in terms of language structure and language use. The learners unconsciously use structures in Chinese in their English writings. Errors occur inevitably. Chinglish expressions are the manifestation of the Chinese thought patterns, in which the learners use literal translation to translate their ideas into English literally. The results of the interview confirmed this finding. In the interview, 45% of the students claimed that Chinese had negative influence on their writings in English.In general, the results of the study show that there is the phenomenon of negative transfer of Chinese in college students' writings in English. And it is manifested at four levels—lexicon, syntax, discourse and thought patterns. Based on the findings, some suggestions are made to avoid this negative transfer of Chinese on English writing.