Research On Chinese Interference In Senior High School Students' English Writing

The impact of first language on second language acquisition has been a heated topic in second language acquisition research. This impact is called native language interference phenomenon. Some linguists believe that even though language interference can't deal with all the aspects of second language acquisition, nothing can be explained thoroughly if you don't think about language transfer. The transfer of Mother tongue falls into two kinds: positive transfer and negative transfer. The former improves one's foreign language study, while the latter cramps the study. Contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage theory have all dealt with the negative transfer of language, which makes people understand native language's negative transfer better and develops foreign language teaching.Chinese senior school students learn English on the basis of their Chinese. So they would be affected by their mother tongue and their knowledge. Also, most students study in the primary stage and their ability of using languages is limited. Therefore they are often influenced by the negative transfer of Chinese. This influence becomes the main obstacle in students' language study, especially in their compositions we can find many such mistakes. Based on that, the present writer wants to find out students' problems in their English study by analysing the mistakes according to language transfer theories. Such a study is also advantageous to the improvement of English teaching methods.From the compositions of a test in a class taught by the present writer the existing mistakes and their causes are examined with reference to the basic requirements of the National English Curriculum Standard for senior high schools. The present writer analyses a good number of negative transfer errors committed by students, in terms of diction, sentence structure, discourse, culture and writing habbits, etc. And the negative transfer of Chinese is just the main cause of their errors. Then the present writer puts forward some suggestions on English teaching in high schools by analysing the errors in the framework of the related theories. That is, we should have a positive attitude towards the phenomenon of negative transfer of Chinese. Second, try to create a practical language environment in order to avoid the negative interference of Chinese. Third, put emphasis on strengthening students' basic English knowledge such as words, sentences and translation. Next is to give them more reading practice and ask them to learn more passages by heart. Last, in the process of English teaching teachers should introduce more cultural knowledge to students to keep them from making some cultural mistakes in their English study.During the study the present writer tried to consult as many materials as possible in order to make the study scientific and believable. Data collecting, classifying, sorting out and analysing the information are the methods used, which have laid a strong foundation for the suggestions on English teaching. The study is expected to give English teachers in senior middle schools some advice on their teaching. Besides, it is hoped that it can lead to more care and much further research into the phenomenon of the negative transfer of mother tongue.