An Investigation And Analysis Of Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In High School Students’ Writing

It reports an empirical study on the negative transfer of native language in high schoolstudents’ writing in China. The research is intended to examine the influence of the negativetransfer on high school students’ writing and find out what types of common errors itcontributes to. To this end, a study, based on the theories of language transfer, ContrastiveAnalysis (CA) and Error Analysis (EA), is carried out by collecting compositions written by120high school students of grade one in No.12middle school. Based on data collection anderror analysis, the errors in the compositions are identified and those resulting from Chineseinterferences are discussed in detail. These interlingual errors are categorized intomorphological errors, lexical errors, syntax errors and textual errors with examples provided.The study shows that negative transfer of mother language is one of the main sources of theerrors for high school students and the differences between two languages are the main reasonsleading to these errors. Therefore, some pedagogical implications are put forward in the end ofthe dissertation. This dissertation enriches the study of language transfer through an empiricalstudy. It aims at helping both high school students in China to increase their writing ability andimprove their language proficiency and English teachers of high schools in tackling students’writing errors and making adjustments in their teaching methods in writing.To start with, the definition and classification of transfer are given. The thesis alsointroduces the concept and the sources of language transfer theory: Error Analysis, ContrastiveAnalysis and Interlanguage. Then subjects, method, instrument and procedure are introduced.After that the thesis concentrates on listing errors due to the negative transfer. The errors arecategorized into morphological errors, lexical errors, syntax errors and textual errors. The studyshows that negative transfer of mother language is one of the major sources of the errors, andthe main reason is the difference between the two languages. Thus, some pedagogicalimplications are drawn about what should be done in order to reduce negative transfer ofmother language in fifth chapter. First, teachers should guide students to use dictionary properly.Second, teachers should explain new words in English. Thirdly, teachers should also increasethe input of English resources by various means so that students can develop English sense.Finally, more attention should be paid to raise the cross-culture communication awareness.