A Study Of Negative Transfer Of Chinese Syntax In English Writing

Owing to the rapid development of culture and economy all over the world, English becomes more and more important in communication. For non-English major students in the Vo-tech colleges, mastery of English writing skills will obviously contribute to their personal development in the future. However, most students do not master the English writing skill well. They tend to apply the knowledge of their mother tongue to English writing, which causes some errors in writing. This research attempts to answer the following two questions: 1)How does Chinese influence Vo-tech college students’ English writing on the syntactic level? 2) What are the strategies that can be used to constrain the influence of negative transfer of Chinese syntax on students’ English writing and improve their English writing on the syntactic level?Both qualitative and quantitative researches are applied in the study. 100 students from one Vo-tech college in Yunnan are involved in the study. The instruments adopted in this study include pre-test and post-test writing samples, experimental teaching, and questionnaire. Through analyzing the data, the following results are got: 1) Chinese has negative influence on English writing on the syntactic level from the following aspects, namely, omissions, agreements, more than two verbs in one sentence, cohesion, word order, tense, nonfinite verb, sentence fragments, voice, avoidance and over-use. 2) The combination of Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis can help students constrain the negative influence of Chinese syntax on English writing and improve their English writing on the syntactic level. Based on the result of the research, the following strategies are suggested to minimize errors resulting from negative transfer of Chinese syntax in English writing: 1) to pay attention to the positive effect of mother tongue; 2) to enforce grammar teaching; 3) to strengthen the teaching of contrast between Chinese and English syntactic structures; 4) to take an objective attitude towards errors; 5) to encourage students to read English materials extensively.Although the research has some limitations, it has some implications for teachers to teach English writing. Further research can be conducted in Chinese negative transfer in Vo-tech college students’ English writing from the perspective of lexicon and discourse.