| Language and thought are closely connected with each other. They influence and interactwith each other. Language is the main tool of thought. Thought embodies itself by certainmeans, and manifests itself in certain language forms. The Eastern people and the Westernerslive in the different regions, due to the influences of the different geographical environment,historical and cultural backgrounds, the Eastern people and the Westerners have formed theirown unique thought patterns. A lot of scholars abroad and at home agree this view: theOriental people (represented by Chinese) focus more on synthesis, holism and intuition, whilethe Western people (represented by the English) pay attention to analysis, individuality andlogic. Originating from psychology, transfer refers to the influence of the previous knowledgebeing extended to the new area. Whitney firstly introduced this concept into the field oflinguistics more than a century ago. Language transfer can be classified into two kinds, whichare the positive and the negative transfer. Positive transfer refers to the phenomenon that theprevious knowledge helps or facilitates the learning of the new knowledge. Negative transfer,also known as the interference, refers that the previous knowledge hinders the learning of thenew one. It is very significant to make better use of positive transfer and avoid negativetransfer in foreign language learning.Writing is a process of thinking activity. It is very common that language transferoccurred in Chinese students’ English writings, and especially the negative transfer hasaroused learners’ and educators’ attention. Since senior high school students are in the initialstage of English learning, comparatively speaking, their English writings are deeplyinfluenced by the negative transfer of mother tongue. Therefore, this thesis focuses on thestatus of high school students’ English compositions, and then discusses and studies it fromthe perspective of the differences between Chinese and Western thought patterns. The purposeof it is to have a deeper understanding of the basic condition of their English writings, to findthe existing problems and analyze their reasons, finally to propose solutions. In this research,the author collected143English writings which came from students in Grade Three, the SixthMiddle School of Qiqihar. And all the students are from three natural classes. In addition,these writing samples are collected from the students’ midterm English examination papers inthe first semester of Grade Three. By the analysis of the data, students’ English writings in this thesis are analyzed from three aspects, which are lexical, syntax and discourse.(1)Lexical Level: there are lots of lexical errors in students’ writings, which can be categorizedinto the confusion of part of speech, wrong collocation of words and wrong choice of words.(2) Syntactic Level: influenced by the differences between Chinese and Western thoughtpatterns and the Chinese syntactical structure, there are six kinds of sentences oftencommitted by students, such as fragment sentences, wrong use of the predicate, faultyparallelism and so on.(3) Discourse Level: the results of this research show that the locationof the topic sentence, discourse organization and the cohesion and coherence of the paragraphand passage are easily influenced by students’ Chinese thinking mode. According to thisresearch, errors occurred in students’ English compositions are closely connected with thedifferences between Chinese and Western thought patterns. Thus, it is suggested that theteaching of high school students’ English compositions can not only focus on the training oftheir writing ability of the target language. However, the training of students’ English writingability should start from comparing the differences of Chinese and Western thought patternsin order to help students analyze the reasons of errors and enhance their English writingability effectively. |
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