A Study On The Impact Of The Negative Transfer Of Chinese Grammar On Senior High School Students’ English Writing

When Chinese senior high school students try to learn English, they have already had a complete Chinese language system. Therefore, they always get interfered by Chinese inevitably during the process of second language acquisition. Language transfer has always been a very hot topic for researchers and teachers who teach or study English. There is strong proof that Chinese senior high school students are influenced by Chinese in their English writing. The negative transfer of Chinese is the main reason that causes errors in senior high school students’ English writing. Researchers both at home and abroad have done a lot of researches about the mother tongue transfer theory. But the research subjects of researches carried out abroad are not about learners whose mother tongue is Chinese. And most researches at home take college students as their research subjects. Based on the previous researches carried out both at home and abroad, this thesis focuses on the impact of the negative transfer of Chinese grammar on senior high school students’ English writing.Based on contrastive analysis theory, error analysis theory and inter-language theory, this thesis mainly studies the impact of the negative transfer of Chinese grammar on senior high school students’ English writing. This thesis takes two classes of Bohai Senior High School as the subjects. All together, there are 80 students involved in this research. One of the classes is the control class, the other one is the experimental class. New teaching method, namely contrasting English with Chinese and comprehensive training approach, is adopted in the experimental class, while traditional teaching method is adopted in the control class. Questionnaire and SPSS software are used to analyze the experiment result. This thesis tries to answer the following questions:(1) What kind of errors are caused by the negative transfer of Chinese grammar?(2) Why do these errors appear in students’ English writing?(3) How is the negative transfer of Chinese grammar overcome by contrasting English with Chinese and comprehensive training approach? Hopefully, this thesis will offer some teaching guidance for teachers in senior high school by answering the above questions. According to the research which lasts for the whole semester and the pre-test and post-test of the scores of the students’ English writing, a conclusion can be drawn that the new teaching method indeed improves students’ English writing.