A Study Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer In Senior High School Students' Writing

Writing which is a combination of almost every aspect of language knowledge can fully reflect students'language level. As nowadays English teaching has attracted considerable attention in China, English language researchers and English teachers have also attached importance to the teaching of English writing. English and Chinese belong to two different language families, and great differences exist in various aspects such as morphology, syntax, culture, etc. The research results obtained at home and abroad show that mother tongue negative transfer exists in the process of writing.Theories of error analysis, contrastive analysis, mother tongue transfer and inter-language are illustrated in the first part. Then text errors are analyzed in linguistic categories and error sources based on 120 compositions are selected from Grade 1 students in a certain senior high school of Jilin Province. It is found that many intra-lingual errors are caused by mother tongue negative transfer; no clear division between errors traceable to mother tongue negative transfer and those that are independent of mother tongue negative transfer; many intra-lingual errors are caused by mother tongue negative transfer indirectly. Except the errors caused by overgeneralization, etc., there are 1168 errors found in inter-lingual errors and intra-lingual errors. The errors directly and indirectly caused by mother tongue negative transfer constitute 60%, which shows that mother tongue negative transfer is the most important source of errors in senior high school students'writing. Errors caused by mother tongue negative transfer are analyzed through contrastive analysis between English and Chinese in detail.In the last part, a final conclusion is reached that senior high school students, who are in the beginners'stage of English study, are short of adequate English inputs in the Chinese language environment, so they are prone to the mother tongue negative transfer in their English writing. Therefore, it is suggested in this paper that by means of proper teaching methods teachers should have a proper attitude toward the errors and should effectively help students eliminate their mother tongue negative transfer and form a proper habit of writing and finally improve their writing ability.