An Empirical Study Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer On English Writing Of Junior High School Students

The junior secondary stage is the critical period of training students’ writing competence. But affected by characteristic of this stage, Mother Tongue Negative Transfer is an ubiquitous phenomenon in the junior high school students’ English writing process. Moreover, junior high school English teachers pay less attention to it and have no specific teaching methodsThe study combined Contrastive analysis, Error analysis and Inter-language theory to analyze the Mother Tongue Negative Transfer phenomenon in junior high school students’ English writing. The author did an experiment with two classes of Tsingtao 26 middle school in Shandong Province for twelve weeks. The teaching strategies of writing about Mother Tongue Positive Transfer were employed in the experimental class, and conventional teaching strategies of writing were employed in the controlled class. The experimental tools are questionnaire, records of think-aloud translation, tests and PTA scale. After the experiment, the author used SPSS17.0 software to do correlation coefficient analysis, multi-sample statistic analysis, independent-samples T test and paired-samples analysis with the collected dates in the Pre-test and Post-test.The results of the experiment indicated that the quantity of thinking of mother tongue influenced the scores of students’ English writing. The more the quantity of thinking of mother tongue is, the higher scores students get. Mother tongue interference had a great effect on junior high school students’ English writing,mainly in the morphology, vocabulary, syntax and discourse. Syntax had the greatest impact. It also indicated that employing the teaching strategies of writing about Mother Tongue Positive Transfer could improve the scores of students’ English writing. The author summed them up, in order to help the teaching strategies of junior high school English teachers be more scientific and effective.