Correlation Between Students’ Native Language Writing Proficiency And English Writing Proficiency

In the recent decades, English, as a global language, has been well-developed. People all over theworld in their daily life, in the process of globalization, come to realize the irreplaceable significance ofEnglish. It has become one of the most wide-spread communicative tools. There is no doubt that Englishwriting is an important part in English learning. Firstly, it is one of the four basic elements in the courseof English teaching and learning, involving vocabulary, phrases, sentence structures, grammar, whichoutputs leaners’ comprehensive language acquisition. What’s more, writing plays a vital role, influencinglearners’ performance in various English exams and applications. Furthermore, English writingproficiency has its practical needs in society. Actually, Students do not learn English only for the purposeof passing exams. Most importantly, nowadays, a number of jobs require people to communicate withforeigners or foreign companies not only through phones but also e-mails or faxes. As a consequence,future job hunters need to have an outstanding ability to express themselves both in Chinese and English.Influenced by the National Matriculation English Test, English writing belongs to a subordinate partin daily teaching and learning activities, because even in the National Matriculation English Test, writingonly marks25within100or150words. Students have more difficulties in dealing with the part andgetting higher scores. Therefore students pay much more attention on multiple choices, reading, cloze,error correction in order to get higher marks.Researchers have made different studies on English writings. A number of linguists state thecorrelation between learners’ L1writing proficiency and their L2writing proficiency. Taylor (1975)argues that as the proficiency of learners’ target language developing, learners would depend more on theknowledge and transfer of their target language less from their native language. Cummins(1989) discoversthat the learners’ level of first language acquisition correlates their L2writing output. Canale (1988)asserts that there is a positive correlation between learners’ Ll and L2writing.According to theories of common underlying proficiency and language transfer, the author putforward two hypotheses:1Students’ Chinese writing proficiency correlates with English writingproficiency in general.2: Correlation between students’ Chinese writing proficiency and English writingproficiency differs in writing genres.The research subjects are89students from two parallel classes of Grade Two in Kangxian NO.1Middle School of Gansu Province. Every participant is asked to finish four Chinese writings andfour English writings basing on the four writing genres including argumentation, exposition, narrativeand practical writing. The712writing are rated. Facilitated by correlation analysis of SPSS17.0, focusingon the five groups of Pearson Correlation Coefficients of Chinese argumentation writing proficiency andEnglish argumentation writing proficiency, Chinese exposition writing proficiency and English expositionwriting proficiency, Chinese narrative writing proficiency and English narration writing proficiency,Chinese practical writing proficiency and English practical writing proficiency as well as Chinese writingproficiency and English writing proficiency. The author analyzed the correlation between Chinese writingproficiency and English writing proficiency. In order to make further research about the subject, theparticipants are invited to have a related interview about their understanding of L1-L2writing andwriting genre.The results indicate that English writing proficiency is correlated with Chinese writing proficiency ingeneral. Correlation between students’ Chinese writing proficiency and English writing proficiency differsin writing genre. English writing proficiency is highly correlated with Chinese writing proficiency inargumentation and practical writing. Chinese and English exposition writing and narration writing areweakly correlated.The study aims to provide necessary pedagogical implications in the procedure of English writingteaching. All the results of the research demonstrate learners’ Chinese writing proficiency closelycorrelates with their English proficiency. Nevertheless, the majority of students have no consciousness ofthe correlation. On the consequence, they could not take good advantage of their Chinese writingproficiency when they compose their English writing. On the consequence, English teachers need tocultivate their students’ consciousness of cross-language in daily teaching.