The Investigation And Study On Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Non-English Majors' Writing

As a combination of almost every aspect of language knowledge, writing is regarded as amirror which reflects learners' language level. However, Chinese college students, especiallynon-English majors, always make numerous kinds of errors in their English writing. It is hardfor college students to master English because English and Chinese belong to two differentlanguage families and a lot of differences exist in various aspects such as vocabulary, syntaxand morphology. There are a lot of errors in English writing caused by Chinese negativetransfer, which make English language teachers and learners puzzled. Therefore, how to avoidthose errors in English writing is worth discussing nowadays. However, we should know aboutwhat kinds of errors are caused by mother language negative transfer and how those errors arecaused, if we want to avoid errors in English writing.Linguists and language researchers in China and abroad have researched secondlanguage acquisition for several decades. But they focused their attention on the learningprocess itself and the research scope is wide. As for some specific problems, they didn't paymuch attention to. These problems relate to what the real situation in the non-English majors'English writing is, and what the specific solutions to those numerous errors in English writingare. We can find that the existence of errors in English writing is still a problem and headachefor English language teachers and learners. Based on the theories of Language Transfer, ErrorAnalysis as well as Interlanguage, the author lays emphasis on collecting and analyzingnumerous errors such as lexis, morphology and syntax found in non-English majors' writing inthis thesis. Through analyzing the distribution and frequency of errors, the author wants toexplore Chinese language negative transfer on students' English writing and find the relatedsolutions to teaching and learning of English writing.In this thesis, some questions like following need to be researched in detail: What is thedistribution of errors caused by mother tongue in English writings? What the most non-Englishmajors' weakness of English knowledge in their writings is? What are the causes of errors inwriting? How does the negative transfer of first language influence English writing? All ofthese questions will be explored by researching data collected from non-English majors'writing through quantitative and qualitative research. All the subjects are coming fromAccounting and Finance, and International Trade respectively in Huashang College of ShanxiUniversity of Finance and Economics. All of them had the similar language learning experience and they were preparing for CET4at that time. Two writing practices were selectedas samples in this thesis. The titles of those two passages are What's in Fashion and ModernTechnology, both topics are related with students' text book.Through this study the author finds that distribution of errors in syntax is of the highestfrequency in their writing, whose frequency is much higher than that of lexical and morphology.Meanwhile, we find that the frequency of errors of subordination is lower than our previousjudgment. However, this phenomenon cannot prove that students have already masteredsubordinate clauses well. Instead of that, the students avoid using subordinate clauses onpurpose in order to reduce errors in their compositions because they are not good at writingclauses. Meanwhile, intralingual and interlingual effects are causes of errors together. Thatmeans the appearance of errors in writing may be the result of mutual functions. And thenegative transfer of L1can effect second language acquisition directly and indirectly. Based onthese findings, some suggestions about English language teaching and learning in China will become up in this thesis as well.