A Study Of The Effects Of The Mother Tongue On EFL Writing By The Senior Middle School Students

The impact of first language on second language acquisition has beena heated topic in second language acquisition research. However, within thelast few decades, its importance has been reassessed several times. Therewas an assumption that most of the difficulties the second language learnersfaced were imposed by his or her first language, which was represented bythe behavourist learning theory and contrastive analysis. With thedevelopment of Interlanguage Theory, the mother tongue is regarded as asource from which the second language learners may consciously borrow inorder to improve their performance.Furthermore, in China, as one of the important processes of language,writing has been widely neglected compared with the other three processes:listening, speaking and reading. Researchers, examining English writingwithin a domain of language transfer, have mostly dealt with writing basedon a biased result. This study, based on the theoretical framework ofLanguage Transfer Theory and Interlanguage Theory, explores the impact ofChinese on writing in English through a comparison of two different processof writing in different groups, specifically direct writing and writing viaconversion from Chinese to English. The overall objective of the presentstudy is to examine the impact of Chinese on English writing in contrastto the view that thinking in Chinese or writing out a text first in Chinesemay actually inhibit the production of good writing in English. The presentstudy intends to address three issues. First, are there any differencesbetween writing an essay directly in English and writing one in Chinese firstand then converting it into English? Second, what are the major benefitsand limitations of direct writing and writing via conversion? Finally, howshould the role of first language (L1) be evaluated in second language (L2)writing?In order to answer these questions, an experiment was designed basedon prior studies. Two classes from Heze No.2 Senior Middle Schoolparticipated in the experiment. They were asked to complete Englishcompositions using two different processes while doing writing activities.The experiment lasted ten weeks. A comparative study and the post-testquestionnaire were conducted between the two sets of compositions in orderto explore the effects of Chinese on the English compositions. The findingsindicate the language style of compositions by Class CW (Chinese writers)was generally more complex than that of Class EW (English writers), thoughthere were no significant differences between the two groups in structure.As to the contents of the compositions, students in Class CW produced manymore ideas and, on the whole, performed better than those in Class EW. Theresults of this study demonstrate that the senior middle school studentsuse their mother tongue consciously or intentionally and the mother tongueplays a role in English writing.This thesis is composed of five parts. The first part is a review ofthe former theories and studies about the influence of the mother tongueon foreign language learning. The second part is the theoretical basis ofthe study. The third part presents research methods and procedures of theexperiment. The Fourth part specifies and analyzes the results of theexperiment, which support the views put forward by this study that the mothertongue has some positive effects on EFL (English as a Foreign Language)writing. The last part of this study recommends research of this topic.