A Study Of The Positive And Negative Transfer In The Teaching Of English Writing

During the process of English teaching, teachers always find the fact that various kinds of errors and mistakes occur during the language acquisition procedure from the perspective of listening, writing, speaking, and reading skills, among which English writing is the embodiment and measuring the standard of the students overall language proficiency. Therefore, it is worthwhile and influential to figure out the problems lying in the language writing procedure. After mastering large amount of the vocabulary and the grammatical knowledge, the students still feel hard to master the skill of English writing. One of the important reasons lies in the language transfer both positively and negatively.Writing was considered as the most challenging skill for a significant number of students. Therefore, it was extremely important to understand what the students’ composition differs from the original language in terms of writing in order to be able to respond actively and appropriately to their demand when they sit the exam. Hence, the main objective of the present study was to investigate student’s mother tongue’s positive and negative transfer in their writing from the perspective of lexicon, wording, syntactic and passage cohesion.The present study, taking Halliday and Hasan’s theory of Cohesion of English as its theoretical bases, attempts to test the following three questions.1) How do students transfer their mother tongue in terms of lexicon, order, syntactic and passage in their English writing?2) To what extent do the students transfer their mother tongue positively or negatively in terms of lexicon, order, syntactic and passage?3) Which of the above language transfer should be highly strengthened during the teaching process if any negative transfer occurs?With the aid of SPSS16.0on data processing, Pearson correlation coefficient analyses of the subjects’ writing, or specifically composition, both in Chinese and English were performed. The findings from the results support the hypothesis that the mother tongue influences the SLA writing in terms of positive and negative transfer as is certificated by a lot of researches. Therefore, teachers should pay attention to fostering the coherence and organization more during the teaching of the writing class, which causes great positive transfer. More attention should be paid on the grammar as it exerts great impact on the students’writing. Only when teachers devote more energy to these parts can the students be taught effectively and efficiently during the class hour.