A Study On Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In EFL Writing By College Freshmen

As is well known, Chinese and English belong to two different families, and there are great differences exist in various aspects such as vocabulary, syntax,morphology and so on. In English writings, Chinese college students make all kinds of errors. What types of errors do they often make? Are there any regularities? Why do students make errors, and what are their sources? How does L1 interference function in EFL writing? These questions are the major concern of this thesis.In light of the theory of contrastive analysis, error analysis, and language transfer, as reviewed in the second chapter, the paper analyzed 50 compositions written by non-English major freshmen in XX College. Through an integration of quantitative and qualitative analysis, frequencies of errors and distributions are sorted out in linguistic categories and error sources are analyzed. It is found that mother tongue transfer has a bad effect on Chinese college students' compositions. The paper suggests that language teachers should pay more attention to the teaching of vocabulary, grammar and writing strategies to improve the students'writing abilities.This paper contains five chapters. It is organized as follows:The first chapter serves as an introduction to the study, including research background, significances and purpose of the study and research questions.The second chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical research literature relevant to this study. The theories concerning transfer, including Error Analysis, Contrastive Analysis, Inter-language Research, and Transfer Analysis are explained in detail.The third chapter is concerned with the research design. The subjects involved in the research, the instruments employed in the study as well as data collection, classification and analysis,three research questions are put forward.In chapter four, the writer gets the results of the error distribution and discusses the sources of errors at various levels,by using quantitative and qualitative analysis.In chapter five, some useful proposals are put forward for English teaching based on the research findings.