A Research On The Effects Of Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue On Sophomore Non-English Majors’ Writing

Formal English teaching and learning in China has developed over one hundredyears. The four skills of English, namely, listening, speaking, reading and writingshould develop in balance. However, due to the exam-driven educational system inChina, both teachers and learners only focus on whose language aspects being testedin exams. Although writing is also contained in most kinds of exams, since writingonly accounts for a quite small percentage compared with other skills, say, reading,and it is the most time-consuming skill to improve, the fact is that both the teachersand students pay little time and attention in the teaching and practicing of writing skillwhich contribute to the unsatisfied performance of students writing.Another factor attributes to students poor performance in writing lies in thedifferences between the mother tongue Chinese and the target language English. Sincethese two languages belong to two different families of language, there exists aconsiderable number of differences between them, such as vocabulary, grammar,syntax, etc. Due to the existing differences, a phenomenon named language transferappeared. Language transfer refers to the situation that second language learnersunconsciously transfer what they have acquired previously in their mother tongue tothe learning of the second language. When the language transfer quickens thelearners acquisiton of a second language, a positive transfer occurs; while on theother hand, if the language transfer hinders the acquisition of a second language, it isa negative transfer, and it is more common in the process of a second languageacquisition. Aa a consequence, a negative transfer may lead to students various errorsin English writing.The effects of negative language transfer of mother tongue aroused the author sinterests. Since most of the relevant research were on the English-majors, the author,after careful consideration, focused on the non-English sophomore major students. Assophomore students, they have to participate in College English Test Band Four,which is essential in universities, and writing comes in the first place in the exam.Under this circumstance, writing is critical not only in students scores but also determines students attitudes and feelings in finishing all the test. If a student did anot satisfied job in the writing part, he/she may came to a conclusion that it wasimpossible to get a satisfied score in this test, thus he/she may could not focus on thefollowing parts and even gave up the total test.Based on the previous consideration, a series of hypotheses were introduced bythe writer about the negative language transfer of mother tongue on sophomore non-English major students writing capacity. The purpose is to find out what the generalsituation is in terms of errors made by the subject students in their writing, whethermother tongue is a major source of errors, and how to avoid these errors in writing.The subjects in this research were50sophomore students from one university inChina. They were organized in the same class with different majors. Three methodswere adopted to collect data, namely, writing tasks, questionnaire and interview. Theresult of the research indicates that students improve English writing capacity bymaking fewer errors after twelve weeks instruction of the differences between themother tongue and the second language which means they were less affected by thenegative transfer of mother tongue. In addition, students hold a positive attitudetowards the formal writing training and they believe they benefit a lot from it, for itnot only improve their writing skill, but also let them become much more interestedand confident in English learning.