A Case Study Of Mother Tongue Transfer On Rural Junior Middle School Students’ English Writing

Long and Richards pointed out language transfer had been a central issue for the appliedlinguistics, second language acquisition and language study at least one century in the prefaceof the book Language Transfer published by Odlin in1989. Zhao Shikai, a famous linguist athome, also noted that mother tongue transfer was the basic problem in the study of secondlanguage acquisition. As is known to all, the development of the theory about languagetransfer had undergone the process of twists and turns from the prosperity of the1950s andthe1960s, to the decline of the1970s, until the renaissance in the mid-1980s. In recentdecades, linguists at home and abroad have studied language transfer from different angles.This thesis mainly attempted to discuss the influence of mother tongue transfer on JuniorMiddle School students’ English writing in rural areas.As one of the most important means for language learning, English writing not onlyreflects the students’ comprehensive language knowledge but also reflects their languagecompetence in communication. Along with the advancement of New Curriculum Reform, theeducational circles have paid more attention to students’ English writing, and thus a higherstandard for their English writing has been set up. Because most students learn English inprimary stage, their abilities of using language are limited. What’s worse, the education inrural areas is rather poor and students are in lack of sufficient language environment.Therefore students’ English writing is often influenced by their mother tongue transfer,especially the negative transfer, which has become the main obstacle for improving theirEnglish writing proficiency.Based on theories of contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage, and onprevious achievements, this research classified and analyzed the main errors in students’ English writing in rural areas by error analysis theory. As to each kind of error, the paperprovided some typical examples to analyze and then explained the causes for these errors. Theauthor, taking110students in Class3and Class4of Grade Nine as subjects, did anexperiment in the course of internship in Jinghua Community Middle School. The errors werecollected and classified based on the subjects’ English writing tests in the two classes and thedata were analyzed by the software SPSS, and then the causes for these errors were searchedfor. Before the experiment, the author divided the two classes into the experimental class andthe control class. There were two tests, the pre-test and post-test in this experiment. Thepurpose of the pre-test was to make sure that the students in the two classes shared the sameEnglish level while the aim of post-test was to testify whether the Product-Process Approachand other teaching measures adopted in this experiment were effective for improvingstudents’ English writing abilities. The author found that there were eleven kinds of errors instudents’ English writing, such as misspelling, capitalization, punctuation, subject-predicateagreement, nouns, verbs, articles, conjunctions, prepositions, personal pronouns and clauses.They belonged to categories of vocabulary errors and grammatical errors, most of which weremainly derived from the mother tongue transfer. Finally, the author explained the reasons indetail from the theory of error analysis, interlanguage and from the study of affective factors.According to the results, the author put forward some pedagogical implications, designedsome countermeasures as well as teaching methods so as to arouse students’ learning interestsand enthusiasm and to improve the overall level of students’ English writing abilities.