Chinese Negative Transfer In High School Students English Writings: An Error-Analysis Perspective

In the second language acquisition process, there has been a relatively completenative language system in the learner’s mind which influences the learner’s secondlanguage acquisition. This influence is called negative transfer of native language.Native language transfer is an undeniable phenomenon. Native language transfer,especially negative transfer of native language is always concerned by languageresearchers and teachers. Writing is one of the skills of senior high school studentswhich reflect their comprehensive language knowledge. It is the reflection ofstudents’language communication level. There has always been the trace of nativelanguage negative transfer in the high school students’English writing. The nativelanguage negative transfer has become the main obstacle of the students in improvingtheir English writing. This thesis is on the basis of language transfer theory, contrastanalysis theory and error analysis theory, combined with previous researchachievements; it researches the Chinese negative transfer in high school students’English writing. Through classifying and analyzing the errors, it tried to find out theorigin of the errors. The aim of the research is to reduce the influence of the Chinesenegative transfer to the lowest and look for more effective teaching methods ofEnglish writing to improve the high school students’English writing capabilityaccordingly.This article introduces the essence, definition, and types of transfer, and thenreviews the domestic and foreign research about the influence of native negativetransfer in English writing. What follows is the theoretical basis and the researchdesign which contains the aim，the object，the methods and the procedures of thestudy. Then the errors resulting from Chinese negative transfer in the students’composition samples are classified and analyzed in five aspects which are substanceerrors, lexical errors, syntactic errors, discourse errors and culture errors. The typicalexamples of every error are presented and analyzed to points out that the errors arecaused by the differences between Chinese and English. The thesis concludes that the high school students are in the primary stage of English learning and they lack properEnglish language environment, so there must be the interference of Chinese in theirEnglish writing. Therefore, the teacher should treat the errors properly and help thestudents overcome the interference of Chinese in their English writing througheffective teaching methods.