A Study On The Relevance Of Mother Tongue Transfer And College English Writing

Among the four basic skills of English learning—listening, speaking, readingand writing, writing is taken as the most complicated skill, meanwhile the mostobvious one to prove the level of the students’English in the university. So it isunderlined by people. Linguists, professors and teachers both at home and abroadconduct research in different linguistic levels, from different angels and bydifferent methods. Compared with the students’mother tongue writing, Englishwriting not only requires the students’certain linguistic competence, but needsthem to know how to apply writing strategies and skills. The students often facethe errors in their process of English writing, whereas one of the most noticeablefactors leading to these errors is negative transfer of mother tongue.Mother tongue transfer, as a common phenomenon during foreign languagelearning, is the obtained language knowledge which affects the acquisition oftarget language. The transfer can be divided into two kinds—positive transfer andnegative transfer. Positive transfer means that the obtained language knowledgepromotes the target language learning, on the contrary, negative transfer plays ahampering role in the learning of target language. Many errors in English writingin colleges originate from negative transfer of mother tongue.The purpose of this thesis is to do a research on relationship between mothertongue transfer and college English writing. By elaborating the history oflanguage transfer, the author makes a comparison and analysis of differentlanguage characteristics between Chinese and English in the aspects of lexis,syntax and discourse, and discusses the existence and detailed performance ofnegative transfer of Chinese to the students’English writing. In this thesis, basedon language transfer and error analysis, the author sets 80 sophomore students inShenyang Normal University as subjects and talks about the negative transfer ofmother tongue to college English writing by conducting analysis of their questionnaire and the results of their writing tests.This research adopts the quantitative methods and qualitative study whichincludes questionnaire about the application of mother tongue during their Englishwriting. Error analysis focuses on the three main categories and thirteensubcategories. The analysis of errors frequency proves: of all the errors in thelearners’English compositions, the proportion of the errors caused by Chineseinterference is nearly half of the all errors, which shows that Chinese students’English writings are greatly influenced by mother tongue transfer.Based on the findings and analyses of the phenomena of mother tonguetransfer on English writings, some suggestions and implications are also given tohelp improve teaching and learning of English. To promote the quality ofstudents’English writing, proper measures should be adopted to eliminate orminimize the interference of negative transfer of mother tongue in students’English writing and the author proposes five countermeasures: 1. help the studentsto promote the ability of the English thinking way; 2. focus on English lexiconand grammar; 3. make comparison between L1 and L2; 4. treat the learners’errorsin right ways; 5. pay attention to cultural knowledge in L2 teaching and learning.