Negative Transfer Of Mother Language To Target Language In ELT Writing Practices And The Countermeasures

With the deepened development of the national college English reform, to cultivate college students'practical capacity, especially the ability to listening and speaking, has become a core of the college English teaching and reform. Among the four important language skills in second language learning,writing is regarded as the most complex one for Chinese college students. Compared to students'writing in their native language, students have to acquire language proficiency, writing strategies and skills in English writing. One noticeable factor that exists in Chinese students'English writing is the negative transfer of the mother tongue. English writing is a process of both language activities and thinking activities, where the thinking mode affects language product. As a higher standard for English composition is set in examinations, it is crucial for English teachers to help college students find and correct errors caused by negative transfer of Chinese thinking mode.Based on the study of Ellis (2000),Koda (1999),Corder (1967),Dai Weidong (1994) and Gui Shichun (1985), the thesis is intended to probe into the situation in which such negative transfer occurs in students'English writing and attempts to reveal its leading factors, thus some more practical countermeasures are put forward to improve their English writing abilities. Firstly focuses on the study of the proportions of interlingual errors and intralingual errors by doing the research on English major students'writing errors, and then aims at exploring the sources of the errors according to the research findings provided by the interview. The thesis starts with a literature review of the related research of error analysis in the past decades, and then Language Transfer is involved. Three research questions are put forward as the goal of this research. After the empirical research has been performed, discussed and analyzed, corresponding countermeasures are offered for the improvement of teaching English writing.This research employs the quantitative and qualitative methods. The language errors are collected from 200 college students'writings. The collections are classified into three broad categories. The quantitative results show that the grammatical errors stand out. Chinglish is on the top rank among the errors in tense and voice of verbs are the most common grammatical errors. Results also show that there are some correlations among the three categories. Results from the interview further confirm that Chinese students'writing errors are affected by Chinese interference. Detailed discussions and analyses of errors help to draw a conclusion that Chinglish is the direct result of Chinese negative transfer. Chinese interference has an effect on Chinese college students'writing proficiency to a certain extent. Therefore, language teachers should draw more attentions to the teaching of vocabulary, grammar and writing strategies in order to improve their writing abilities.