A Study Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer In Senior High School English Writing

Writing is the reflection of students’ comprehensive language skills, which is a loyalindicator of students language proficiency. Nowadays as English teaching is attracting moreand more attention from educators and linguists in China, English language researchers andteachers are also attaching importance to the teaching of English writing. English and Chinesebelong to two different language families, and great differences exist in various aspects suchas sounds, words, syntax, and discourse. Researches both at home and abroad show thatnegative transfer of mother tongue is a phenomenon that cannot be overlooked.Integrating theory with practice, this thesis first reviews the theory of mother tonguetransfer, contrastive analysis and error analysis as the theoretical foundations. Then by usingsamples of119compositions by Senior1students in Zhangzhou No.1Middle School ofFujian Province, this thesis analyses errors occur in English compositions written by middleschool students, categorizes these errors and explains the sources of such errors in details. Theresult of the study shows that most of the errors in students are caused by the negative transferof mother tongue, which are mainly reflected at phonetic, lexical, syntactic and textual levels.In the last part, based on the above analyses, a final conclusion is reached that seniorhigh school students at the beginners’ stage of their English study, are short of adequateEnglish inputs in the Chinese language environment, so it is obvious that negative transfer ofmother tongue exist in their English writing. Therefore, it is suggested in this thesis that bymeans of proper teaching methods the negative transfer in English writing caused by mothertongue influence will be gradually reduced and teachers should effectively help students forma habit of English thinking in order to improve their writing.