Astudy On The Correlation Between English Majors’ Chinese And English Writing Abilities

Writing, as one of the four basic skills in English learning, is the comprehensive use oflanguage knowledge, which was not only regarded as the difficult point for masses of students,but also the focal teaching point for teachers. How to improve the English writing abilityeffectively is a common problem for both students and teachers. Teachers always find thatstudents’ English writing is influenced by Chinese in terms of structure, grammar, and dictionand so on. The influence of the mother tongue on the second language has always been atrending topic in the field of second language acquisition. The overview of the current studyabout the mother tongue transfer at home and abroad suggests that a majority of researcherspay much attention to the negative transfer of L1on L2writing, while the relevant studiesconcerning the positive transfer of L1are very limited. Additionally, there are short ofresearches about the relationship between L1writing ability and L2writing ability. Therefore,this research is highly motivated to explore and analyze the relation of the writing abilitiesbetween L1and L2which will be beneficial to learners to improve English writing ability andhave pedagogy implications for teachers.Based on the theory of Cummins’ Common Underling Proficiency Hypothesis and someother relevant theories, this study aims at exploring the positive impact of Chinese on Englishwriting. The main questions are put forward as follows:(1) Is there positive correlationbetween Chinese writing ability and English writing ability?(2) Will students’ Chinesewriting ability affect their English writings in terms of lexical density, average sentence lengthand the cohesive markers?To answer the above questions,52sophomores of English majors from HuanggangNormal University are selected as the participants in this research. All the participants arerequired to complete the Chinese writing task and English writing task which share the sametopic. The final scores are put into the Pearson correlation coefficient to analyze thecorrelation between Chinese writing ability and English writing ability of students.Furthermore, student’s English writings are divided into High Group and Low Group. HG(High Group) refers to the English writings of the students whose Chinese writing gradesrank in the top twenty. LG (Low Group) refers to the English writings of the students whoseChinese writing grades rank in the last twenty. By comparing their English compositions, thisstudy aims to analyze the impact of students’ Chinese writing ability on their English writingsthrough the following three aspects: lexical density, average sentence length and the number and the type of the cohesive markers of English writings.Through the data analysis of this research, it has been concluded that there is highmarked correlation between students’ Chinese writing ability and English writing ability.Chinese writing ability has positive impact on English writings from the aspects of lexicaldensity, average sentence length and the number and the type of the cohesive markers.