A Study On Negative Chinese Transfer In English Majors' Writing At Syntactic Level

"Transfer is the influence resulting from the similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired." (Odlin,1989) Language transfer has been a central issue in the field of second language acquisition and foreign language teaching for a long time. Between the 1950s and 1960s, the behaviorists, with Lado as the representative, considered language transfer as interference and contrastive analysis became prevalent for a short while. In the 1970s, the linguists, with Corder as the representative, regarded language transfer as communication strategy and contrastive analysis gradually lost ground to error analysis. Until recently, the linguists, with Schachter as the representative, viewed language transfer as a complex psychological cognitive process. Since 1990s, with the rapid development of computer technology and the establishment of learners' corpus, the corpus-based study on language transfer has gained a large number of achievements. However, with the confinement of marking and analysis techniques, studies at the moment are mainly conducted at lexical level and those at syntactic level remains quite limited.In the thesis, based on the theories of Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Markedness Theory, the author combines qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to probe into the influence of native language transfer in Chinese students' English writing at syntactic level. Specifically, the thesis aims at answering the following questions:(1) What kind of errors do English majors often commit at syntactic level in their English writings and what are the reasons that cause these errors?(2) Do the English majors employ L1 thinking ways in their English writing process and do these L1 thinking ways negatively influence their writings?(3) Based on the findings, what implications can be drawn for English teaching? The subjects for the study are sixty-two sophomores of English majors from two classes in Qingdao Qiu Shi Vocational College. Three instruments are adopted in the research:English writing assignment, English writing test and questionnaire. The students were told to finish a "sentence correction" assignment after they finish learning sentence writing. Then in their final examination paper, they were asked to write down a composition——a letter of complaints. Questionnaires were done just before the students' final examination. Next the author collected the valid writing samples for analysis, and analysed in detail those errors resulting from Chinese influence at syntactic level in the thesis. The errors from negative Chinese transfer at other levels and the errors not due to Chinese influence are neglected.In identifying the errors from Chinese transfer, James'"equivalence translation" (1980) is adopted in the study, that is, the structures of Chinese sentences and English sentences are equated to decide whether an abnormal structure is from Chinese transfer. Dulay, Burt and Krashen (1982) also mentioned that researchers usually translated the structures from TL into NL to decide the similarities between TL and NL. Different from Dulay and Burt, the author treats all the errors relevant to NL as the ones from NL transfer. The foundation is that though sometimes NL is just a minor factor in the causes of errors, it is still considered to have influenced the formation of the sentences in TL (Danesi and Di Pietro,1991:22).The study results in the following two findings:First, ten main types of transfer errors are found in the study—run-on sentences, repetition, concord, ellipsis, adverbial clauses of cause used as independent sentences, word order, concurrent structures, avoidance, passive voice and other syntactic errors. Among the errors, run-on sentence runs the top and constitutes 44.8%, and repetition comes the second and constitutes 14.7%.Then, through the questionnaires to investigate the influence of L1 thinking way in the students' writing process, it proves that the English majors do employ L1 thinking way in their writing process, leading to the negative transfer of L1 in the writing products and eventually negatively influence their writings.Based on the findings, this thesis also puts forward some pedagogical implications for English teaching:1) encouraging students to use English-English dictionaries 2) treating the learners'errors properly 3) introducing contrastive syntactic structures in class 4) enlarging language input and help students develop the English thinking mode 5) feedbacking effectively to transfer errors.