Research On Negative Transfer Of Chinese In Middle School Students' English Writing

Chinese and English belong to two different language families, and there are great differences existing in many various aspects between them, such as vocabulary, syntax, discourse wnting habits and so on. As a result, mother language transfer is an inevitable phenomenon in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). The transfer of mother language falls into two types, one is positive transfer, which improves one's foreign language study; the other is negative transfer, which hinders foreign language learning and leads to errors. Contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage theory have all dealt with the negative transfer of language. It has helped people understand mother language's negative transfer better and developed foreign language teaching.Chinese junior school students learn English on the basis of their mother language—Chinese. So they are affected by their mother language and the related knowledge. At the same time, most junior school students study English in an elementary stage and their vocabulary and the abilities of using English are very limited because of the lack of English environment. Therefore, they are often influenced by the negative transfer of Chinese. It is the main obstacle in students' language study, especially in their English writing. With the reform of English teaching in junior school, a higher standard for junior school students' English writing has been set up. So it is crucial for English teachers to help the students find and correct errors caused by negative transfer of Chinese.The present author has collected and analyzed a great number of language errors from 50 junior school students' compositions of a test; the existing errors and their causes are examined with the reference to the basic requirements of the National English Curriculum Standard for Junior Schools. It has been found that negative transfer of Chinese is just the main cause of their errors. Negative transfer of Chinese had a bad affect on junior school students' English writing in many ways such as vocabulary, pronunciation, morphology, syntax, discourse, culture, writing habits and so on, however, most of the errors in junior school students' English writing are caused by negative transfer of vocabulary, syntax, discourse and writing habits, so the four aspects of negative transfer of Chinese will be mainly analyzed and discussed in this research.Based on error analysis and transfer theory, the author employs the quantitative and qualitative methods. Detailed discussion and analysis of errors help to find some suggestions about English teaching and learning. Firstly, a positive attitude should be put forward to negative transfer of mother language. Secondly, try to help the students avoid the negative interference of mother language by creating a practical language environment. Thirdly, pay more attention to strengthening students' basic English knowledge such as words, sentences and discourse. Finally, enlarge the students' language input to improve their output by doing more reading practice and reciting and dictation of English passages.