An Investigation On Chinese Students' Learning Of English Transferred Negation At Zhumadian No.1 Senior Middle School

Transferred negation is a specific linguistic phenomenon in English learning. Transferred negation can be called"negative raising"or"negative transportation"(Quirk et al,1985) . It is a particular syntactic phenomenon in English grammar. It has been agreed on that in English grammar some of the verbs which belong to two categories of expressing"opinion"or"perception"permit the occurrence of negative transfer (Quirk et al, 1985). Those verbs are think, believe, seem, appear, sound, etc. The typical example of transferred negation is the sentence construction:"I don't think + (that) clause", which is regarded as one in the narrow sense and which is a research topic in linguistics. In this thesis, the transferred negation is regarded as one in the broad sense, which not only includes the typical type of transferred negation but also other phenomena of the transfer of negation from the original place to the place that the negative operator is to negate in interpretation. The transferred negation in the broad sense is divided into two types one in the complex sentence and one in the simple sentence.On the basis of the studies of theoretical transferred negation and related practice in second language teaching and learning, the investigation of senior middle school students'mastery of transferred negation was carried out. The research instruments are a translation test and a questionnaire. The results of the translation test and questionnaire were processed by SPSS 13.0 and discussed in terms of the related theories of Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis and Markedness theory. The research participants were chosen randomly from a Social Sciences Class and a Natural Sciences class. After the test, the statistics of results were displayed in tables grouped by Class and different interpretations of the sentences of the translation test. The objectives of the investigation were: 1) to investigate the level of students'learning of transferred negation; 2) to analyze different interpretations of types of transferred negation in order to get the reasons; 3) and to discuss the implication of future teaching and learning of the results of the discussion of the data of the test. Then it concluded that there are three main reasons for the different interpretations of the sentences of the test, the positive transfer and the negative transfer of the native language and the difficulty caused by the markedness in English. And the data of the questionnaire indicated that the students have been aware of the influence of the Chinese language on the learning of English. Therefore students and English teachers can learn and teach English transferred negation according to the way of comparison and contrast to get a better view of its features.