A Survey On Negative Transfer Of Native Language In English Writing Of English Majors Students

Transfer is a common phenomenon in foreign language learning, which results from the similarities and dissimilarities between native language and target language. The research in this thesis is carried out to explore the relationship between native language transfer and English major students'English writing. This thesis lists manifestations of language transfer and puts emphasis on making a contrastive study of the different characters between Chinese and English while analyzing the various errors in Chinese students'compositions caused by negative transfer of Chinese at the levels of substance, lexis, syntax and discourse etc.40 English major students in Xi'an Technological University are the subjects in the research. They are divided into basic and advanced groups in accordance with their different proficiency of English and whether they have passed TEM4. Through the quantitative and qualitative study that involves analysis of the sample writings and the questionnaire plus interviews about their knowledge of the differences in English and Chinese and their writing strategies in the process of producing an English composition, the author found that learners have vague information in the dissimilarities of two languages and they are influenced consciously or unconsciously by native language transfer in the process of English writing. Negative influence of native language (NL) at the levels of substance, lexis, syntactic and discourse occurs in the sample compositions made by almost all the subjects with different levels of proficiency of target language (TL). Chinglish expression is also not to be neglected. The research also shows that with the increasing of learners'comprehensive knowledge of the target language, negative transfer will decrease to some degree. On the basis of the research and analysis, it seems to be impractical to erase negative transfer in the learners' L2 (second language) acquisition, hence corresponding certain strategies are put up to help achieve the purpose of avoiding negative transfer and to promote target language acquisition and English teaching as well.