Analysis On Chinese Negative Transfer In Senior High School Students' English Writing

Writing error is one of the major production errors that most language teacher may encounter in the language teaching process. In the process of English learning, writing ability clearly demonstrates the students' comprehensive ability in using English. Negative influence of the first language remains a chief obstacle in the path of the Chinese students' improvement in their writing ability.The current study aims to investigate the transfer of mother tongue on English learners' writing in Chinese senior high school and explore efficient teaching and learning methods and strategies. The focus is to explore the complex influence of native language transfer on English writing of senior high school students, errors that occur in English writing and causes of them.Chapter Two presents a literature review of theories and studies relevant to the present research project including the theory of Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis, Interlanguage and language transfer. Then a data-based analysis of text errors is made. 100 compositions are randomly selected from 280 written by students in Grade Two from Number One Middle School of Xinji in Hebei Province. Through an integration of quantitative and qualitative analysis, text errors are analyzed in linguistic categories and error sources to find their distribution and frequency.It is found that many intralingual errors are caused by L1 interference indirectly. Many errors are caused by L1 interference. Then these errors are analyzed through analysis between English and Chinese in detail. In consideration of the findings from the research, great efforts should have been made to seek implications for English teaching and learning in China, especially in senior high school. Therefore, through the study of transfer of mother language, the students, together with the teachers, can be guided to take notice of differences between Chinese and English as well as the factor of transfer in English learning and teaching, diminishing the influence of negative transfer of Chinese so as to improve the students' writing ability and enhance teaching.