On The Negative Transfer Of Mother Language In English Majors' Speaking Performance

In learning a foreign language, a learner's mother tongue will inevitably hinder his learning or even lead to the pragmatic errors. This phenomenon is called negative transfer in linguistic research. Since 1950s, the research on negative transfer of mother tongue has been the central issue of linguists and researchers. In the meantime, many new theories such as Error Analysis, Contrastive Analysis and Interlanguage have provided guidance for them. But the majority of the previous researches focus on the relationship between L1 transfer and language writing, and little attention has been paid to the aspect of foreign language speaking.Inspired by the early researches, this study tries to probe into the problem of how negative transfer of mother tongue influence students'oral English. The author collects Chinese students'verbal data in their English speaking performance and analyzes them by transcribing them into written form. Errors analysis (EA) and contrastive analysis (CA) are mainly adopted to detect the distribution of negative transfer errors in order to help students reduce the influence of negative transfer errors.This research sets its subjects on the freshmen and sophomores majoring in English in the College of Foreign Studies in Guangxi Normal University and makes an empirical study on the negative transfer of mother language in the students'English speaking performance. The present author attends the oral classes and observes the oral performance of the subjects. Finally, the verbal data are recorded and transcribed into written form, followed by error analysis within the framework of relevant theories. The results of this research are presented below.1) L1 transfer errors take a dominant part in speech errors and they take place in each type and subtype both linguistically and culturally. The fact gives the evidence that negative transfer is an inevitable phenomenon in students'oral English learning.2) Of the four dimensions in linguistic categories, errors in lexis, syntax, morphology and cultures rank in descending order, among which lexical errors are the most prominent, indicating that this is the greatest problem for students in their English speaking.3) Among the lexical errors, errors of content words take the most proportion, accounting for 73% of all lexical errors. 4) Concerning the syntactic errors, redundancy errors are ranked at the first place and it is believed that students are apt to commit the redundancy errors in the syntactical level.5) Although errors in culture only rank the bottom in the four dimensions in linguistic categories, they are ranked at the top in all the subtypes in linguistic categories. The samples collected in the research show that students always confuse with the differences between Chinese and English cultures and it is difficult to erase the errors in cultures.Potential sources of the errors are discussed after data analysis. Pedagogical implications, limitations of the present research and suggestions for further research are also provided at the end of this thesis.