The Effects Of Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue On Sophomore English Majors’Writing

Language transfer has been a controversial topic in second language acquisition,which must be taken into account both in learning and teaching a foreign language.Researchers at home and abroad have done numerous researches, most of which showthat the phenomenon of language transfer can’t be denied. So Chinese, withoutexception, may also have an influence on English learning for our Chinese learners.Since English writing is the most difficult one among the four basic skills and it alsoshows the learner’s overall English level, writing is selected as the object in thisthesis.This study attempts to explore the effects of negative transfer on sophomoreEnglish Majors’ writing by means of a writing test and two interviews. The authorexamines40compositions of sophomore English major students in Jiangxi NormalUniversity by adopting Carl James’ error classification criterion in order to find outwhat the general situation is in terms of errors made by English majors in their writing,whether mother tongue is a major source of errors, what language levels arenegatively affected by mother tongue and which aspect is affected most, and in whatway English majors adopt L1strategies in their English writing.Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis in this study, the majorfindings are drawn as follows:1) Errors in the samples can be classified into twokinds: interlingual and intralingual errors. The percentage of interlingual errors ismuch higher that of intralingual ones, which indicates that mother tongue is still themajor source of errors in sophomore English major students’ writing.2) There arefour language levels negatively affected by mother tongue: substance errors, lexicalerrors, grammar errors and discourse errors, of which grammar level is affected most,followed by discourse errors. Lexical and substance errors rank the third and fourth respectively. At substance level, errors in both capitalization and punctuation occupy avery small percentage of total errors, with capitalization a bit higher. As for lexicallevel, the percentage of assumed synonymy is similar to that of word collocationwhile the latter is a little higher than the former. With regard to grammar level, errorsare most frequently committed in terms of disagreement. Omission ranks the secondand the third comes tense/aspect. At discourse level, lack of topic sentences andinappropriate first/second person are spotted in the subjects’ compositions and theformer is more serious than the latter.3) Almost all of the students adopt L1strategiesand are more or less influenced by mother tongue, whether before or while writing.Based on the findings, some implications are put forward in order to improveEnglish writing competence: pay special attention to the differences between Englishand Chinese writing; read extensively; do lots of exercise on translation betweenEnglish and Chinese; use proper English dictionaries; and think in English. Inaddition, further suggestions will be mentioned.