Research On Chinese Negative Transfer In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Writing error is one of the major production errors that most languageteacher may encounter in the language teaching process. In the process ofEnglish learning, writing ability clearly demonstrates the students’comprehensive ability in using English. Negative influence of the firstlanguage remains a chief obstacle in the path of the Chinese students’improvement in their writing ability.Transfer falls into two categories: positive transfer and negativetransfer. As English teachers in China, they pay more attention to thenegative influence of Chinese. This research just tries to investigate maintypes of errors made by senior high school students in their English writings,and to find out the specific proportion of errors caused by negative transferof mother tongue.Senior students of Baogang No.1Middle school are the subjects in theinvestigation of this thesis. The method in this study combines qualitativemethod with quantitative method. Based on the learners’ performance in theinvestigation, problems of negative transfer are studied and analyzed.Through a legion of data, both observational and elicited, the study andinvestigation of the problems are carried out. The elicited data come fromthe students’ response in the investigation concerning writing. The eliciteddata reflect120students’ mastery and comprehension of, and producingcomposition in the target language.Therefore, through the study of transfer of mother language, thestudents, together with the teachers, can be guided to take notice ofdifferences between Chinese and English as well as the factor of transfer inEnglish learning and teaching, diminishing the influence of negative transfer of Chinese so as to improve the students’ writing ability and enhanceteaching.