A Study Of Negative Transfer On Verbal Collocations In Senior High School English Writing And Remedial Teaching

Writing, as one of the means of communication, is in universal use in a great variety of fields. In the process of second language acquisition, writing, as a vital part of language output, is an important component in English learning in senior high school. Furthermore, language transfer is a common phenomenon in second language acquisition in terms of positive and negative influences it makes on English writing. The verbal collocation error is one of the transfer errors caused by interference of negative transfer.This research focuses on the analysis of negative transfer errors, or precisely, the verbal collocation errors in senior high school writings, based on consideration of contrastive analysis, error analysis, Interlanguage hypothesis and research on this topic at home and abroad.Specifically, the paper aims to answer the following research questions:(1) What verbal collocational errors are caused by negative transfer?(2) What are the reasons for such errors?(3) What teaching strategies can be implemented to weaken the influences of negative transfer?In order to answer the research questions, three kinds of instruments are employed: writing task, questionnaire and interview. In this research, the participants are 100 students in Grade Two from two normal classes in Panjin Senior High School in Liaoning province. All the participants are required to finish an English writing according to the topic “One Thing I’m Proud of” with 100-120 words in 40 minutes. This topic is chosen from National College Entrance Examination paper of Zhejiang in 2013. The author collects all the writing samples and picks out the verbal collocation errors caused by negative transfer of Chinese. Then, the author classifies these errors into two main groups-verbal lexical collocation errors and verbal grammatical collocation errors, and chooses some typical errors to explain in detail. Then, the author analyzes the main reason for transfer errors in students’ writings by questionnaires and interviews of students. Finally, some teaching methods are suggested to weaken the interference of negative transfer on the basis of the interviews of English teachers.The results of the writing sample collection indicate that students often make verbal collocation errors in their writings. Such errors can be classified into verb + noun collocation errors, verb + adverb collocation errors, verb + preposition collocation errors and verb + grammatical structure errors. Moreover, verb + noun collocation errors and verb + adverb collocation errors belong to verbal lexical collocation error. Verb + preposition collocation errors and verb + grammatical structure errors belong to verbal grammatical collocation error. However, the most obvious errors are verb noun errors. The results of the questionnaire and interviews of students indicate that the reasons for the negative transfer error of senior high school students mainly lies on the cultural differences, limited language input and language environment, students’ cognition of language transfer and learning strategies. In addition, the strategies based on the analysis of interviews of teachers suggest that strengthening the comparison of cultural and linguistic differences, creating language environment and increasing the language input in and after class, giving the students timely feedback and leading them to do more effective practice are effective in weakening the interference of negative transfer in a long run.