A Study Of Language Transfer In English Writing In Junior High School From The Perspective Of Memetics

Students learn English as the second language in China. In the process of language learning, writing is regarded as the most important section. Junior high school students are in the developing stage of English learning, their English levels in middle schools will influence English learning in the future study. When they write compositions, they are easily influenced by native language and thus cause errors, which are called language transfer. It is well known that language transfer is always the crucial filed in applied linguistic, second language acquisition(SLA) and language research. Many scholars have done lots of researches about it. Traditional language transfer researches are analyzed from the perspectives of contrastive analysis and error analysis. However, as a new theory in China, memetics theory explains language transfer from a new angle, which attracts lots of people’s attention. This paper tries to analyze the characteristics of language transfer in a junior high school students’ English writings and explain them from the perspective of memetics. It aims to propose some teaching methods to improve learners’ writing skills and provide a foundation for English learning in the future.The paper mainly takes the impact of native language on a junior high school students’ English writings as the research subject and establishes three research questions:(1) What are junior high school students’ language transfers in their English writing?(2) How to explain these language transfers in junior high school students’ English writing from the perspective of memetics theory?(3) What kind of teaching methods can be taken to help junior high school students improve their writing skills?The paper are based on 120 English compositions, which were written by students who are in grade nine. Then the author collects language transfers in compositions, analyzes and explains them from the perspective of memetics. Meanwhile, 20 students who took part in the English writing test are selected randomly to be interviewed in order to help author know about whether they were influenced by mother tongue in the process of writing. In the process of analyzing compositions, both qualitative method and quantitative method are used.The results are as follows:(1) There is positive language transfer and negative language transfer in students’ compositions. At the same time, many errors in compositions are caused by negative language transfer. They are mainly reflected in three aspects: morphological errors, lexical errors and syntactic errors.(2) According to the memetics theory, the nature of acquiring the second language is the compatible and competitive process between native language and target language. If there are similarities between native language memes and target language memes, they will combine together to form memeplex and facilitate the learning of target language. On the contrary, if the memes of native language and target language are different, they will compete drastically and as is often the case, native language will win the competition. The result is that in the process of learning target language, students replicate and transmit native language memes, which lead to the phenomenon of negative language transfer happening.(3) Author tries to propose some relative teaching methods on the foundation of results and features of students in junior high schools. First of all, middle school students’ writing motivation is so low that they are not willing to write English compositions. Therefore teachers should activate students’ writing motivation. Next, most of middle school students’ autonomous learning abilities are low, they tend to rely on teachers. So teachers should provide guidance in English writing and encourage students to write English compositions. Then, because students are influenced by native language easily, teachers should reassess the role of mother tongue. On one hand, they can take advantages of positive language transfer, on the other hand, they need to restrain negative language transfer. Finally, teachers should utilize textbooks to promote recitation and imitative writing abilities. By doing it this way, students’ writing skills will be improved gradually.However, some researches remain to be supplemented and analyzed in order to make the study more colorful.