Negative Language Transfer On Senior High Students’ Acquisition Of English Writing Competence

The present dissertation studies the applicability of language transfer theory into senior high school English writing learning and teaching. Language transfer, or cross-linguistic influence, as a reasonable explanation of difficulties students confront with during the journey of learning and acquiring a second or foreign language, has been a significant theoretical construct in applied linguistics, SLA and language teaching. It is the influence resulting from the similarities and the differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired. Meanwhile, writing, as a method to assess students’ integrated pragmatic competence in high school, is an extremely complex cognitive activity in which the writer is required to demonstrate control of a number of variables simultaneously. However, there is a gap between students’ existing English writing ability and expectancy. Thus, this study tries to show a clear picture of the role negative transfer from Chinese plays in impeding students’ writing efficiency and make suggestions in improving the situation.Gone through three stages of development, language transfer theory, with several influential complementary theories such as contrastive analysis, error analysis, markedness and interlanguage theory brought about, has been widely accepted. Studies at home and abroad reveal its complex and important role in causing bilingual difficulties. However, previous studies abroad both theoretical and empirical mostly fail to treat Chinese English learners as subjects and domestic researches mainly focus on college students while neglecting populous middle school students who have studied English as a foreign language for ten years or even more. So neither previous investigation of language transfer theory at home or abroad fully look into the applicability of language transfer theory to a certain group of young English learners, that is to say, senior high school students in China. Questions like whether they suffer from language transfer, how serious the transfer is, what are the common errors resulting from transfer, frequency of errors, as well as how to minimize this negative influence remain unanswered or unsatisfactorily answered.This dissertation aims to investigate negative language transfer in senior high by examining errors made in students’ articles and interviewing experienced teachers about their understanding and methods to deal with transfer in teaching. This study involves 48 students and 5 qualified English teacher as subjects, meanwhile,240 articles are collected for the sake of research. Errors are classified into three categories:lexical errors, syntactical errors and discoursal errors. It turns out 689 errors, including 317 lexical errors,257 syntactical errors and 115 discoursal errors, are related to language transfer, accounting for 43% of all spotted errors. All interviewed teacher think negative language transfer as a vital cause of difficulties and errors but they do not reach an agreement about the portion of its responsibility. Different suggestions are listed as well to deal with negative transfer and improve students’ writing competence.