A Study Of Negative Transfer In The Syntax Of Junior Middle School Students’ English Writing

With reference to the language transfer phenomenon discussed in contrastive analysis—this thesis studies L1 interference in the English writing of junior middle school students. Eighty-three Grade 9 students from NO.2 Hanghua Middle School participated in the study. They completed a questionnaire and had a writing test. As the survey reveals that L1 interference mainly occurs at the syntactic level of junior students’ English writing, the author collected 60 in-class student compositions, identified the errors and classified them. Plenty of examples show that one of the major sources of the errors in the data is native language interference in the syntactic structures and such interference can be attributed to the different syntactic rules between the two languages.Considering that junior middle school students, as beginning level English learners, lack adequate target language input in their mother tongue environment, the pedagogical implications of this study for English teaching and learning are: 1) Encouraging students to think in English 2) Motivating students to write in English 3) Highlighting negative transfer of Chinese by way of contrastive analysis 4) Cultivating students’ intercultural awareness 5) Doing more reading 6) Paying attention to collocations and sentence patterns 7) Staying aware of cross-cultural differences and 8) Using proper dictionaries.