An Investigation Into The Effects Of Negative Transfer On Rural High School Students’ English Writings By Yanan Yongping High School

English writing is regarded as the most complex and difficult one in the four basiclanguage skills. So students often make mistakes when they write their Englishcomposition. The main reason for this situation is the negative transfer of motherlanguage，which always obstructs students in their English writing. The negative transferof mother tongue has been a hot topic in second language acquisition area．Therefore，ithas become a major task for English teacher to explore how to help the students toovercome the negative transfer of mother tongue in their English writing and meanwhilefoster their English writing skills．However, the students of China in rural high schools are often influenced by thenegative transfer of Chinese, because they learn English in a limited environment: poorteaching and learning conditions. Therefore this influence has become a main obstacle tothe student’s English writing. This research bases on61students from Yongping Highschool of Yanan. First, by using questionnaire, the writer finds that most students alwaysorganize and write their English writing with the help of Chinese thinking mode andmost errors in students’ English writing are closely related to the negative transfer ofmother language. Second, the writer asks students to write an English composition (noless than120English words) in30minutes under the theme of “holiday plans: stay athome or traveling”, and finds that there are401and383errors respectively in class oneand class two. The errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue constitute about66.2％，which shows that negative transfer of mother tongue is the most important sourceof errors in the students’ writing in rural high schools. Then the writer divided errorscaused by negative transfer of mother tongue into three categories and find that syntacticerrors are the most, which accounts for approximately43.9%of the total number. Next isvocabulary errors, which accounting for28.3%.And the last one is discourse errors,which accounting for27.8%.At last, the writer analyzes each type of error in detail. In the last part, the writer discusses the main reasons of negative transfer of mothertongue in rural high school students’ English writing and some implications forimprovements of English writing. And hope that the research can do a favor in improvingthe writing level of students in rural High School．...