An Empirical Study On The Interference Of Negative Transfer On Rural High School Students' Writings And The Overcoming Strategies

English teachers are often faced with such situations that many students always cannot overcome'Chinglish'which is caused by the negative transfer of their mother tongue. Transfer of one's mother tongue to English learning can be divided into two kinds:positive transfer and negative transfer. The former can help the study of target language and the latter causes interference. According to the errors of language learners, linguists have proposed some important theories:Contrastive Analysis Theory, Error Analysis Theory and Inter-language Theory, all of which are aimed at explaining reasons for the errors of language learners and improving learners' linguistic competence.For the Chinese senior high students, it is very common that negative transfer appears in their compositions. So as an English teacher, the present author of this thesis makes efforts to analyze students'errors and find out their difficulties in the framework of some related theories, so as to offer some effective teaching approaches to avoid negative transfer in their English writing. This research focuses on examination of possible relationship between the errors in foreign language learning and the lexical meanings, word usage, sentence structures, discourse and different culture in their mother tongue, through a questionnaire and an analysis of some sample compositions. The present author will put forward some suggestions of teaching strategies, such as learning lexical chunks, thinking in English, learning passages by heart, introducing culture knowledge and making the most of multimedia in class, in order to avoid negative transfer in students'English writing. In the end, the author will examine whether the suggested teaching strategies really work through an analysis of students'performance in a post-experiment exam. This research is intended to help overcome negative transfer in senior high students'English writing.