The Effects Of Awareness-Raising Of Syntactic Transfer On IELTS Writing By Chinese Students

A lot of research reveals that anyone who wants to offer sufficient interpretation of second language acquisition (SLA) has to take the critical factor—language transfer into consideration (Grass & Selinker,1992). Pica (1984) lists ten most important factors that foreign language teaching researchers are most concerned with, among which the influence of native language (NL) on second language acquisition is on the top. Therefore, the study of language transfer brings great, realistic significance to foreign language teaching in China.Much relevant research on language transfer at home and abroad has been attaching great importance to theoretical analysis of language transfer or the influence of mother tongue (MT) on second language acquisition (SLA), merely a small amount of research has connection with syntactic transfer or the effects of awareness-raising of syntactic transfer (Levenston,1971; Odlin,2001; Zhao Xiufeng 2002). Therefore, based on the theoretical framework of language transfer, contrastive analysis, interlanguage theory, and markedness theory, the study proposes hypotheses and looks into 2 research questions:(1) What kind of syntactical errors caused by language transfer are more salient in Chinese students'IELTS writing? (2) What are the effects of awareness-raising of syntactic transfer?During the process of 4 years of IELTS teaching, the author finds that a lot of Chinese candidates are unable to obtain a satisfactory score, especially in the writing module, and many syntactic transfer errors appear in their compositions. The subjects for this study are 60 freshmen college students in two classes from Anhui Xinhua University who are taught by the author in one big classroom at normal teaching time. 30 of them (the experimental group) are in a joint education program and receive extra 2 months of training with a component aiming at awareness-raising of syntactic transfer in their regular English learning environment, while the other 30 students(the control group) have not received such training under normal teaching schedule.Before and after the teaching intervention (2 months of training with a component aiming at awareness-raising), a pretest (writing a composition) and posttest (writing a composition plus grammaticality judgment test) are conducted, and the data gathered from students'composition samples and test results are analyzed. It has been found that syntactic transfer in students'IELTS writing mainly exists in five aspects (run-on sentences, subject-predicate non-agreement, wrong expression of the passive sentences, omission of the subject, and wrong expression of the existential and presentative function), and the frequencies and causes are discussed in detail. The comparisons of the statistics between the different groups and between pretest and posttest clearly demonstrate that students in the experimental group tend to make much fewer syntactic transfer errors after the awareness-raising training. Then the research questions proposed are answered. Needless to say, there are some limitations of this study. Since the size of data is very small, the findings may not be representative enough. It is also under the influence of subjective factors because of manual analysis.This study intends to explore syntactic transfer errors in IELTS compositions and through teaching activities aiming at raising awareness of such transfer, it helps to reduce the negative effects of syntactic transfer on students and improve their English writing ability. Finally, it provides teachers with an opportunity to reflect on their teaching.