Research On Language Transfer Of Chinese In Middle School Students’English Writing

Second language writing is a key point in second language teaching and it is also a hotspot in the research area of second language acquisition. Recently, along with the development of the English teaching reformation in middle schools, English writing teaching has got more and more attention. The aim of English writing teaching is to cultivate English learners’competence in daily communication by using English, the ability to acquire and manage information in English, and the capability of analyzing and solving problems as well as carrying out critical thinking in English. It is always a hot issue in second language acquisition area to study the features of second language acquisition and solve practical problems during the process of second language writing together with exploring to improve teaching strategies of second language writing. During the process of second language acquisition, the existing of mother tongue transfer is an undoubted fact. Therefore, it has become a major topic how to help students to overcome negative transfer during their English writing process and meanwhile improve positive transfer so as to foster their English thinking habit. The investigation is carefully designed and objectively analyzed. According to the literature review of relative researches both at home and abroad and based on the theory of contrast analysis, error analysis, inter-lingual and so on, the writer make certain the research purpose of exploring the influence of mother tongues transfer in middle school students’ English writing, that is, to study how and to what extent mother tongue can influence students’ English writing. Two research questions are proposed. These questions are concerning the error types in students’ English writing, their frequency, the reasons for errors, the influence of mother tongues transfer, and so on. All of the questions are answered subsequently. Subjects are grade three students from Hebeishidafuzhong Middle School in Shijaizhuang. There are two instruments employed in the study---English writing samples of the subjects and the interview of all the subjects one after another. After reading the collected writing samples, the writer picked out all the errors and carried out a detailed data collection and analysis. It is found that there are17common errors in junior middle school students’ English writing, which can be further divided into lexis errors, syntax errors and discourse errors. The reasons of errors are various, influenced by many factors like language difference, markedness, language consciousness, study factors, etc. The most important factor is mother tongue transfer caused by the differences between English and Chinese. Mother tongue transfer is reflected by grammar and meaning on three sides---lexis, syntax and discourse. Based on the analytic results of mother tongue transfer in this study, the writer presented the implications for the teaching of foreign language writing and also explored foreign language teaching strategies, in order to improve students’ English writing effectively.