Influence Of Chinese Negative Transfer On English Writing Of Senior High School Students

Among the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing), writing is considered to be the most difficult one for Chinese high school students to grasp. In recent years, people pay more attention to English writing with the development of English teaching reform. Many scholars and English teachers at home and abroad adopt different methods to conduct various researches from different points of view. The complexity of English writing often confused high school students who are still in a low level of English learning. One of the main reasons resulting in these confusion and errors is negative transfer of mother tongue.Language transfer is a common phenomenon existing in second language acquisition. It results from the influence of first language and was produced in the process of target language learning. Transfer is divided into two kinds, one is positive transfer and the other is negative transfer. Positive transfer promotes the process of second language acquisition. On the contrary, negative transfer impedes the process. Many errors of high school students’writings are a result of negative transfer.The purpose of the thesis is to explore the relationship between high school students’ English writings and negative transfer of mother tongue. The subjects in the thesis were90high school students in grade11of a key senior high school in Jinan, Shandong province. Based on the related theories such as contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage, the thesis analyzes the manifestation of negative transfer on the high school students’English writings from several aspects such as morphology, lexis, syntactic, discourse and culture.The thesis use both quantitative and qualitative research methods. The writer picked out all the errors in the90sample writing of students and found out the errors resulted from negative transfer of mother tongue and calculated the percentage. Then we classified the errors into five kinds and further divided them into14categories. The research results show that the English writings of high school students are largely influenced by negative transfer of Chinese and the influence is reflected in all levels of language learning.With respect to the relevant problems of negative transfer of mother tongue, the writer puts forward some advice from the perspectives of teachers and students. First, a positive attitude towards native language transfer; second, acquiring vocabulary; third, introducing Contrastive Analysis in the teaching and learning process; fourth, increasing comprehensive input by recitation. These suggestions will help students reduce the negative transfer of Chinese and aid teachers to explore more useful English teaching methods.