A Study Of The Relationship Between English And Chinese Of Senior Middle School Students

The use of mother tongue in English class in China has always been a controversial issue and the impact of first language on second language acquisition has been a heated topic in second language acquisition research. However, within the last few decades, its importance has been reassessed several times. On the one hand, there was an assumption that most of the difficulties the second language learners faced were imposed by his or her first language, which was represented by the behavourist learning theory and contrastive analysis. That is to say, the negative transfer easily make errors in the second language learning. So in many English classes, especially in those labelled as communicative teaching, some teachers greatly advocate the absolute elimination of mother tongue, requiring the students only to use the target language. On the other hand, with the development of Interlanguage Theory, the mother tongue is regarded as a source from which the second language learners may unconsciously borrow in order to improve their performance. That is, the positive transfer helps language learning. So in some what, mother tongue can facilitate English learning.How to evaluate the effect of Chinese on English learning and how to use mother tongue properly in the process of English learning is a very important issue.The study is significant to promote English teaching and English learning in China.On the basis of psychology, second language acquisition and language learning theories, the author carried out the research in order to explore the relationship between mother tongue and English learning. The thesis studies the role of mother tongue based on a certain scale investigation among the senior middle school students. The key question is when, how and to what extent Chinese should be used in foreign languige classrooms-The data in the investigation comprises the subjects'responses to the questionnaires, their English and Chinese achievements and the correlation analysis between the two achivements. Excel and Spss software(17.0) are used in the research for quantitative analyses of the data. From the investigation and result analyses, we can reach the following conclusions:mother tongue has both positive and negative effect on English learning; the learners'English achievements are positively correlated with their Chinese achievements; those who have a high level of Chinese proficiency perform better in their English achievements; Chinese should be used properly and flexibly in English class.Finally, according to the research and data analyses, the thesis put forward some suggestions and implications for English teaching and learning in senior middle school in China. The study still has certain limitations and the paper suggests some possible further study.