A Study Of Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In CET-4Writing

For a century, language transfer has become a core problem in Applied Linguistics,Second Language Acquisition and foreign language teaching field. Its importance inlinguistics has been after many ups and downs, from the prosperity in1950s and the early1960s, to the decline in the late1960s and1970s, and to the later period of1980s’recovery, its developmental process repeatedly twists and turns. It is enough to showpeople’s concern to this problem. On the whole, language transfer from its rise has beenexperienced two historical phases: Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis and InterlanguageHypothesis. From late1970s to early1980s, what put language transfer forward is theMarkedness Theory based on universal grammar. This theory explains the languagetransfer phenomenon by combining the difference between languages and the markednessrelationship which overcomes the shortcomings of behaviorists’ view on languagetransfer. In late1990s, Chomsky’s principle and Parameters Theory were introduced tolanguage transfer study. Interlanguage became the controversial focus among linguists.These years, Chinese foreign language circles have also paid much attention to theproblem of language transfer. Many articles have appeared in various kinds of academicjournals. And books are published to discuss this problem. Domestic scholars in collegeEnglish teaching field have also made more and more research on language transfer fromdifferent aspects. However, the study of the Influence of Negative Transfer of MotherTongue on CET-4Writing is rarely seen.The attention on language transfer in the field of college English teaching is due tothe phenomenon that Chinese students are continuously interfered by their mother tongueduring the English learning process which has a direct impact on the learning effect. Theinfluence can be seen from the students’ performance in CET-4. The main content of thispaper is written based on the language transfer theory and investigation research. Thephenomenon of language transfer is studied through analyzing the errors in CET-4writings, contrasting the difference between Chinese and English and the problems thestudents has met in writing process. The purpose of this paper is to find how and how much Chinese language negative transfer influences English acquisition and the teachingmethods which can help students gradually overcome the interference from Chinese.In order to ensure the reliability and timeliness of the research material, this study istargeted to one hundred non-English majors majoring in four different schools in JilinUniversity. They were all freshmen at the age around of18, and had at least6yearsformal English education experience especially on vocabulary and grammar in middleand high school. They were picked from four complete classes in different majorsbecause the materials provided by them are in even distribution (entrance scores, Englishproficiency, sex ratio). The research was carried out from September2011to January2012, lasting16weeks. During this period, all the students were asked to finish2CET-4compositions. To ensure the reliability, all the compositions were graded, corrected anderrors-classified by four experienced teachers and gave an average point. After that, allthe compositions were distributed to each student with scores and other information.According to the results of the first test, teachers points out the errors which wereinfluenced by negative transfer, and tried to help the students understand how these errorsoccurred, and how to get less interruption by negative transfer of mother tongue and thushad better performance in writing.(this content will be discussed in Chapter Five). Afterten weeks targeted instruction and training, the students were required to write anothercomposition. Another group of data was collected by the same way. The purpose is to seeif there is any improvement during these days learning. Except that, all100objects haveanswered the questionnaire, and30of them have participated in the interview.Based on the data collected, the author has got the following conclusions byContrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and case study. Among all the errors, almost half ofthem are caused by the interference of Chinese negative transfer. The performance of thesecond writing is better than the first one. The ration of interlingual errors is reduced to47%from53%. It can be seen that the subsequent learning and training are effective.Errors from Chinese negative transfer can be subdivided into two broad categories:linguistic aspect (79%) and cultural aspect (21%). And the linguistic level can further bedivided into lexical level, syntactic level, discourse and substances. These results helpboth the teachers and the students have a better understanding of mother tongue negative transfer and lay a foundation for the resolution of this problem. In addition, the results ofquestionnaire and interview indicate that the students have some awareness of theirdependence on mother tongue in second language learning, but have less realization ofthe errors caused it. It is a big misunderstanding only to pursue the correctness ofvocabulary and grammar. In the interview, the students have also showed that after aperiod of training and learning, they all have had some progress to certain degree,especially have found one big barrier in improving their writing performance. They havegot new learning directions and increase their confidence.At last, by the research, the author has got some pedagogical implications onclassroom teaching. First, in CET-4writing class, teachers can guide the students toactively memory more native English expressions and fixed sentence patterns, and carryout intensive training on relative clauses as well as slightly complicated grammaticalphenomenon. Second, teachers should try to introduce more English cultural knowledgein daily classroom, and cultivate culture awareness consciously, for example, watchingEnglish movies and holding English cultural discussions. Three, training the students tohave English thinking mode, leaving them no chance of one-to-one translation is a also aproper method. Teachers should guide the students to cultivate English language sense,such as reading aloud passages, reciting classical articles, etc. If the condition allows,encouraging students to communicate with foreign teachers and students, and feelingtheir thinking mode and language habits are also necessary. Four, the students should beleaded to realize the errors from negative transfer. At last, contrasting the differencebetween the two languages will make the students know how the errors are produced andleave a deep impression.While owing to the complexity of the subject and the limited time, this paper alsohas its limitations. The targeted objects selected in the investigation are only a very smallgroup of college students. The data provided by them are limited. And the classificationbetween interlingual errors and intralingual errors has different standards. Here the authoronly chose one of them. Therefore, the study is far from exhaustive and many shortagesstill await further investigation.