The Influence Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer On Second Language Writing

In the process of second language acquisition research, the influence of mother tongue has always been the focus of public attention. Learners stimulate their knowledge about the mother tongue and apply it to second language acquisition in order to promote output, which is regarded as transfer. As one of the most important issues in the fields of Second Language Acquisition, applied linguistics and related language researches, it underwent controversies in the past decades when SLA was established as an independent discipline.At the very beginning, transfer was considered as an important element in SLA. Then, various topics concerning transfer were under study. During recent years, empirical researches are carried out to examine the influence of language transfer. In this way, studies of language transfer experience the process from prosperity to recession and finally to a rise again. According to the influence of mother tongue on foreign language learning, researchers divide transfer into two types:positive transfer and negative transfer, which refer to the promotion and hindrance of mother tongue on language acquisition respectively. Many people hold the idea that learners can not get over the influence of thinking mode of mother tongue so that mistakes occur due to negative transfer. However, still others believe that mother tongue strategy, if made good use of, can facilitate the learning of foreign language.Writing, as one of the methods in examining students’ comprehensive ability in English, can reflect the influence of transfer in a relatively objective way. The influence of negative transfer is so great that it can not be neglected by language educators. However, many language learners hardly know how it works. The thesis takes non-English majors of lower-class students in the independent college that the writer works in as research subjects and carries out empirical researches to sample compositions. On the basis of certain theories, such as Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) and Error analysis (EA), the thesis gives explanation to the concept of language transfer and analysis of samples, discussing the influence of transfer, especially negative transfer on the learning and teaching of English writing among non-English majors.By ways of analyzing self-designed questionnaires and correcting writing samples, the thesis mainly aims at solving some practical problems including what the main forms of error that result from negative transfer are, how they come into being and can be avoided, what the probable relationship among the key factors in transfer is and how those factors lead to negative transfer.Through careful research and further analysis, the writer has found that (1)language learners form different thinking patterns and language habits due to their diverse values and cognition toward the objective world, which in turn lead to the occurrence of negative transfer; (2) negative transfer most probably results in errors in the writing samples in three levels:lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level, among which the errors in the former two levels are more obvious; (3) one’s language ability in those three levels are somehow related to each other, showing positive correlation or negative correlation in certain situation; (4) the prevention solution of mother tongue negative transfer should be come up with by language learners from their accumulation of correct grammatical knowledge and formation of proper second language thinking patterns during repeated writing process, as well as by language teachers from their teaching of abundant cultural background information and positive learning attitude.The writer hopes that learners could treat transfer correctly through her analysis of the sample compositions. Appropriate treatment to the functions of mother tongue on second language learning will have a positive effect on English writing, thus improving learners’language acquisition.