A Study Of Negative Transfer In L2Writings By Chinese Urban And Rural Senior Middle School Students

Language transfer has been one of the central topics in secondlanguage acquisition since the1950s. A great number of studies haveproved that negative transfer greatly influences second languageacquisition on various groups of participants. However, few researchershave involved Chinese senior middle school students as their participants.Fewer researchers have carried out comparative investigation betweenChinese rural and city EFL learners. Meanwhile, L2writings wouldclearly reveal the influence of negative transfer in the target languageproduction process. Therefore, the study aims to explore and compare theEnglish writings of Chinese city and rural senior middle school students.Based on Language Transfer and Error Analysis, the present studyemploys both the qualitative and quantitative approach to investigate andcompare200English compositions of Chinese city and rural seniormiddle school students. As the first step,85city and rural participants’exam compositions were compared and analyzed respectively. The resultsshow that both groups of participants were greatly interfered by their L1in English writings. The majority of them composes TL sentences in theirL1first and then translates those sentences from L1to TL word by word.Secondly, negative transfer errors were broadly classified into fourcategories, which were Substance, Lexis, Syntax, and Discourse. It is found that Lexical Transfer was the predominant error type in bothgroups. Thirdly, the results of Independent Sample T-test suggest thatthere exist obvious performance gaps between the city and the ruralparticipants. It is inferred that such gaps are not likely to be eradicated ina short time. Additionally, the study also focuses on the intra-groupcomparisons.15participants from the city and the rural group were askedto write an argumentation respectively. These participants’ argumentativewritings were compared with their former writings in the exams. Resultsof Paired Sample T-test suggest that both groups of participants’ L2writings would be greatly interfered by task difficulty.