A Study On The Negative Transfer Of L1 In L2 Writing Of Senior High School Students

Language transfer has been a very important and popular topic in the field of linguistics. Transfer is divided into two types: positive transfer and negative transfer. The research on difficulties that learners have met in the learning of target language has increasingly reflected negative transfer of mother language. Thus, the thesis focuses on the negative transfer from Chinese to English in order to help the learners overcome the negative impact of Chinese on English learning.The thesis takes as the research objects both senior high school students in NO.8 Middle School of Chongqing and New Zealanders in Onehunga High School who are in the same grade as the Chinese students. First, the writer asked the students from two countries to write passages with the same topic and within the same time, in which passages from Chinese students are as the main objects of the research while passages from New Zealanders are as comparison; and then the writer marked the compositions of Chinese students with teachers from NO. 8 Middle School of Chongqing; finally, the writer analyzed the errors from the compositions with theories of language transfer---contrastive analysis, error analysis, interlanguage and so on. All the statistic of the research is from the compositions written by 62 Chinese students.Based on the data from the investigation, the present thesis focuses on how and to what extent the senior high school students are influenced by their mother tongue in English writing. The research suggests that students from senior high school are influenced by their mother tongue during the process of target language acquisition, for their knowledge of mother tongue is well-molded. The research also suggests that the errors in total are 416, in which, however, errors influenced by mother tongue negative transfer are 287, i. e. negative transfer has a great influence on L2 acquisition. Out of the 287 errors, errors in sentence are close to a half, especially run-on sentences are up to 31; errors in morphology are close to a third, in which errors in articles are up to 49; errors in vocabulary are up to 49, which caused by the improper choice of words; errors in text are also up to 23.With the analysis of the errors in the compositions of Chinese students', the topic how to get rid of it and to make the English learning more effective is discussed in Chapter five. In this chapter, the writer offers some strategies on learning and teaching to overcome negative transfer, which includes such strategies: (1)teachers encourage students to read various interesting topics in English, in order to consolidate what the learners have learned and heighten the similarity of the learners on English; (2)teachers help learners construct English thinking model by contrasting English and Chinese; (3) teachers encourage learners to use different kinds of dictionaries in proper ways, for example, mastering the usages of synonyms in various occasions by using synonym-dictionaries. .