A Case Study On Grammatical Errors Caused By Negative Transfer Of Chinese In English Writings Of Rural Middle School Students Based On The Inter-language Theory

As we all know, English writing has still been one of standards to measure learners’English level, and it has become an important teaching task for English teachers. However,due to the poor learning condition, it is quite difficult for Chinese rural students to improvetheir English writing faculty under the influence of native language. As a result, students oftenworried about English writing and even some students lose confidence in it, which deeplyaffects their English learning. In order to solve this problem, the author aims to help studentsovercome grammatical errors caused by native language transfer into English writing in ruraljunior high schools, which based on inter-language theory, error analysis theory. After settingup a theoretical foundation, the author designs an experiment on the grammatical errorscommitted by the rural students in their English compositions.In this experiment, the author prepares to collect some grammatical errors from ruraljunior high students’ English writings, to classify these errors, to analyze the causes for theseerrors, and to explore the effective way to help students overcome these grammatical errors.During the teaching process, the writer applies error correction approaches and guidesstudents to correct grammatical errors by themselves. Furthermore, the author tries toencourage students to read widely, to recite the authentic English passages, to raise theirwriting interests, and to boost their awareness of cross-linguistic and cultivate languagesenses and learn how to think in English.Quantitative and qualitative methods are applied in this study. The subjects are selectedfrom two classes of Junior2students from Wu Chang First Middle School (N=103) who aredesigned randomly as one experimental class (class1) and one controlled class (class2). Thequestionnaire is applied in this study, which makes the study more reliable and scientific. Thequestionnaire is designed to find out what types of grammatical errors are often committed byrural junior students, and which part is the most difficult in English learning and study howthe Chinese thinking pattern affects rural students in their writings. In the pre-test, all thesegrammatical errors from both two classes are collected and classified. The score of Englishwriting is marked by an experienced English teacher and the author. The grading criteria ofthe compositions can refer to the one of high school entrance exam (the full score for theEnglish exam is150, while the full score of English writing is25), which is also applied inthis experiment and provided in appendix C. The experiment lasts for sixteen weeks. In the post-test, the data from these two classes are collected again and analyzed by means of SPSS16.0, which aims to test the significant difference of English writing level between the twoclasses. In the two classes, score of English writing achieved by the experimental class ishigher than that by the controlled class; it can demonstrate the new teaching method can helpstudents overcome the grammatical errors caused by negative transfer, and vice versa.