A Study On Negative Transfer Of L1in High School Students’ English Writings Based On Error Analysis Theory

In the five English learning skills, writing is considered as the synthesis that reflectsstudent’s English proficiency. However, even those students with high Englishproficiency can make numerous errors in English writing. A lot of researchers have foundthat some errors are caused by the negative transfer of L1. In other words, students areinfluenced by Chinese and write English with Chinese thinking pattern. However,Chinese and English are two different languages with a lot of differences existing invarious aspects. Therefore, how to reduce or avoid the influence of negative transfer ofL1is an important problem in Chinese English writing teaching.To solve the problem about how to reduce or avoid the influence of negative transferof L1, researchers should firstly figure out what kinds of errors are caused by negativetransfer of L1and reasons of committing errors. Therefore, the present research questionsare:(1) What kinds of negative transfer errors can be classified in students’ writingmaterials? What is the frequency of each kind?(2) Is the number of negative transfererrors increasing or decreasing with the scores of students’ writing materials?(3) Whatare the reasons of negative transfer errors?Based on the theory of Error Analysis and Language Transfer, the author classifiesand analyzes the negative transfer errors in High School students’ English writings fromlexis, syntax and discourse. The causes of negative transfer errors are analyzed throughquestionnaire.This study finds that syntactic errors are the most in the three aspects of errors. Thenumber of negative transfer errors and students’ English writing proficiency are ofnegative correlation. At last, the author analyzes the reasons of negative transfer errorsand offers some proposals in English writing teaching to reduce the influence of negativetransfer of L1on English writing.