A Study Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer And Relevant Teaching Strategies In Senior High School English Writing

Writing is an important part in English teaching and plays a prominent role inteaching and learning. Even though the students in senior high school have mastered somegrammatical knowledge, there are still many Chinglish in their writing. To help studentsget rid of Chinglish, and improve the level of writing, it is urgent to correct some errorswhich are caused by mother tongue negative transfer.Language transfer has been a very important subject in the field of second languageacquisition. The famous linguist Odlin (1989) summarized a series of language transferphenomena over decades and gave it a concise and exact definition: Language transferrefers to the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target andany other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired. It isacknowledged that the positive influence is called positive transfer, negative influencecalled negative transfer (Odlin1989:27) The past decades have witnessed roughly threestages—contrastive analysis, error analysis and inter-language theory in the research ofnative language transfer, which deepens people’s knowledge on language transfer andimproves second language teaching to a large extent.The author selected seventy-one students in Grade One in a senior middle school inShenyang in Liaoning province as subjects. The students’ writings tests, questionnaire andinterview are used to make analyze. And the research attempts to find answers to thefollowing questions:What are the differences in terms of relying on mother tongue strategies betweensuccessful learners and unsuccessful learners in their English compositions; on whataspects do the mother tongue negative transfer manifest in their English writing? And whatare the differences between successful learners and unsuccessful learners in these aspects?According to the results of the research, compared with the successful learners,the unsuccessful learners rely on mother tongue strategies more often. The phenomenon ofmother tongue negative transfer mainly represents in interlingual errors, includingsubstance errors, lexis errors, grammar errors and cohesion or coherence errors. Comparedwith successful learners, the substance errors made by unsuccessful learners are moreserious. They always translate word by word and relay on mother tongue strategies. Theerrors made by successful learners mainly represent in grammar rules which they cannotcompletely understand or they may ignore them. At the end of the thesis, the author puts forward some strategies in order to cultivatestudents’ consciousness of second language writing, evade mother tongue negative transferand then improve the ability and the awareness of discourse coherence.