On Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In College Students' EFL Writing

Based on the theories of Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage Research, the author made an empirical study on transfer errors to investigate the influence of native language transfer on Chinese students' English writing. Specifically, the thesis aims at answering the following questions:(1) What are the common interlingual errors that Chinese college studentscommit in their EFL writing?(2) What are the sources of the errors identified?(3) Do non-English major students rely on Ll strategies in their EFL writing?(4) What is the possible proportion of mother tongue interference in Englishwriting?The subjects for the study are ninety-six sophomores of non-English majors from two intact classes in Nanjing Audit University. Three approaches are adopted in the research: English writing test, questionnaire and interview. The students were told to write two compositions with given topics and word number. The author collected 180 valid writing samples for analysis. Questionnaire and interviews were done after writing task was finished. Two other English teachers were invited to help the author with scoring the compositions and identifying the errors made by students in the compositions. Those errors resulting from Chinese influence are discussed in detail in the thesis. The study results in some findings:(1) 20 main types of interlingual errors are found in the study, of which the error in word choice runs the top and constitutes 21%; the error in tense comes the second and constitutes 17%.(2) Two major categories of error sources are explored, that is, interlingual errors and intralingual errors. Of the two categories, interlingual errors constitute 62.5 percent and intralingual errors take up about 37.5 percent. So altogether 62.5 percent of errors are caused by mother tongue transfer. This result reveals that mother tongue transfer is one of the main causes of errors for Chinese students in their English writing.(3) Besides, there are some other findings: Chinese EFL students' reliance on their mother tongue is greatly determined by the degree of markedness of certain linguistic structures; learners' way of acquiring English vocabulary, their knowledge about cross-linguistic differences between English and Chinese, and their writing strategies are also found to play a part in their reliance on their mother tongue in EFL compositions.Based on the findings, this thesis also works out some pedagogical implications for the EFL learning and teaching in China. It calls attention to the teaching of basic vocabulary and grammar in college. Teachers should cultivate students' abilities to think in English. Teachers should as well draw on CA in their practical teaching to raise students' awareness and knowledge of language differences, and students themselves should pay attention to the problem of negative transfer and gradually reduce transfer errors. Teachers are also advised to treat students' errors properly. Since some errors will tend to diminish, or even disappear with further study of students, teachers should not be too serious about such kind of errors.