On The Negative Transfer Of Chinese In Middle School Students' English Writing And Inspirations To Teaching And Learning

The function of language is communication. There is no doubt that writing, as a means of communication, is one of the most important ways to facilitate the function. As the reform and open policy go on, especially after China joined the WTO, the exchange between foreign countries and ours is becoming more and more frequent. So whether we can communicate successfully relies on whether we can express ourselves correctly and accurately in English writing.The Newly Published English Syllabus for Students in Full-time Ordinary Senior Middle Schools (1999) puts forward some requirements for the students' writing. In the NMET, the marks of the writing take up 25 scores, which is 1/6 of the Ml English paper. So the students' writing ability sometimes becomes one of the key factors to get good marks.However, China and English-speaking countries have different geographic locations, so their histories, social systems, religious beliefs are different. So are their living styles, cultural customs, habits, values, world outlooks and modes of thinking. And what's more, as Chinese and English belong to two different language families, the usage and expressions of their languages are sometimes very different. The middle school students often write English compositions under the influence of the ways of the Chinese language, which results in many mistakes. For the above-mentioned reasons, in this thesis, we collect some mistakes from the middle school students' writings, analyze them and classify them, and draw a conclusion that Contrastive Analysts and Error Analysis are among the good solutions to this problem and, from the angle of transfer, that the cause of these mistakes is mainly the negative transfer of the Chinese language. The thesis mainly analyzes the differences between English and Chinese and the cause of the Chinese students' making mistakes in the aspects of morphology, syntax and collocations, in which it proves that there exists negative transfer ofChinese in middle school students' writing in order that we can find out the way to deal with the problem to help the students write efficiently and accurately and finally improve their writing ability. This thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter One is Literature Review of Contrastive Analysis (CA) both in China and abroad. The next three chapters deal with negative transfer of Chinese in relation to English writing of middle school students in morphology (Chapter Two), syntax (Chapter Three) and collocations (Chapter Four). Chapter Five discusses inspirations to teaching and learning.