A Study On The Phenomena Of Negative Transfer On English Grammar Learning Of College Students

This paper focuses on the phenomena of negative transfer on English grammarlearning of college students. The author made an empirical study in this paper. Theexperiment was carried out to test the students’ grammar learning and investigatewhether negative transfer influenced college students English grammar learning andthe degree of the influence. Major findings are illustrated in the paper. Based on theresults of the study, the author also puts forward some teaching strategies.The participants of this study are the freshmen from three classes in a universityin Changchun. The ages of these students are from19to21and there are82participants, including3boys and79girls. The author taught these three classes fromSeptember2013to January2014. The author is more familiar with the students’personal situation and learning conditions. They have learned English before but theirgrammar learning is not good. The research questions are:1. What are the characteristics of college students’ grammar learning?2. To what extent is the students’ English grammar learning influenced bynegative transfer?3. In what ways can we avoid the negative transfer in English grammar teaching?The data are collected from test papers, questionnaire and interview. Throughanalyzing the results of the grammar tests, the author summarizes some features ofstudents’ grammar learning: in grammar learning, it is easier for the students to masterarticles than nouns and sometimes they forget to put articles before nouns; sometimesthey make mistakes in grammar exercises because they don’t know the meanings ofwords, such as the meanings of nouns; sometimes they can’t realize a passive voicesentence when “by phrase” is omitted; intermixing is an obvious feature existing inthe students’ errors in tense and aspect; with regard to the simple sentences learning,they have difficulties in learning exclamatory sentence; in terms of the complexclauses learning, it is easier for the students to master adverbial clause than the othercomplex clauses; of all the grammatical items, it is the easiest for them to learn imperative sentence and the most difficult to learn attributive clause. Secondly,negative transfer makes great influences on students’ English grammar learning. Theycan’t get rid of the interference caused by Chinese. Thirdly, in view of the negativetransfer in English grammar learning, some strategies are put forward to avoidnegative transfer in English grammar teaching: making contrastive analysis ofattributive clause in Chinese and English; training students to think in English;providing effective feedback to transfer errors; enlarging students’ vocabulary.