A Study Of Negative Transfer Of Native Language On The English Writing Of Senior High School Students

Writing as an output becomes more and more important in EFL learning. In recent years, writing part in the College Entrance Examination are also becoming larger.. But over the years, writing skills are still the most challenging for high school learners. The reason is that students are to learn a certain foreign language based on the experienced mother tongue, and therefore it is inevitably influenced by their knowledge and experience of their mother tongue. In this thesis I will analyse how foreign language learners are influenced by their mother tongue with language transfer theory. I have also made a survey on negative transfer errors among high school students to search for some reasons for those error roots with comparative analysis theory and error analysis theory in order to further explore how the native language influences English writing of high school students.The thesis aims at finding out the negative influence of native Language on the high school studnets'writing. Based on the relevant theories and research findings of Second Language Acquisition, this thesis carries out a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis towards errors caused by negative transfer of high school students. The subjects for the study are a total of 225 students from three different levels of high schools. Two approaches are adopted in the research:English writing test and a questionnaire As the statistics from the tests has further proved that high school students are apt to be interfered by their mother tongue in their English writing, I proceed to study some examples of mistakes resulted from the negative transfer of the mother tongue, with some typical examples attached to each kind of mistakes, in order to clarify the differences of expression between the two languages. Finally, this thesis draws a conclusion that only with strengthened practice from words, sentence patterns and structures can the English writing abilities of the students be improved, and better results be achieved on the side of English teachers.The teaching improvement gained by some researches on the writing of Negative Transfer can help English teachers learn more about the errors types in learning English, and also help high school English teachers to achieve better teaching results.This thesis is composed of the following six chapters and it proceeds in the following way:Chapter one reports the relevant theoretical foundation of this study, including a brief review of the error analysis theory,interlanguage theory,transfer theory and the researches carried out so far at home or aboard.Chapter two serves as a design for my study of negative transfer of native language on the English writing.First of all, four issues to be solved are raised,then introduce the object of study,research methods procedures,then sort out the errors involved in English writing,and collect the data of the study.Chapter Three analyzes and discusses the result of the questionnaire and composition testing and point out the reasons why senior high school students make such mistakes in writing by qualitative and quantitative methodsChapter Four is the core of this thesis,in which the negative transfer theory is used to analyze the typical error types on different levels,and the causes for these errors are given a profound analysis.Chapter five is devoted to putting forward some specific suggestions for teaching based on the research result.The last part concludes the thesis. The limitation of the study, solutions and suggestion for future research are pointed out.