On The Influences Of L1 On Chinese Middle School Students’ English Writing:Insights From An Empirical Study Of Their Writing Miscues

Language transfer is inevitable in second language acquisition, as well as second language teaching. EFL learners often unconsciously apply their previously acquired language knowledge to the learning of the target language. For Chinese students learning English as a foreign language, the impact of the mother tongue, or the first language (L1), can never be ignored. This impact often manifests itself through cross-linguistic transfer, including positive transfer and negative transfer. As a form of output and a key subskill in language competence, writing is considered to be the most difficult skill for students to master. Since Chinese students are learning English in a non-English country, they are unavoidably influenced by their mother tongue during the English writing process. The impact of Chinese on students’writings in English should never be underestimated.The theoretical framework serving as the guide for this research is based on error analysis (Corder,1967,1981) and miscue analysis (Goodman 1973), which provide a fresh way of looking at students’errors/miscues from a psycholinguistic perspective. Goodman initiates the term miscue to show that the deviate forms don’t appear at random; instead, these miscues can reflect a writer’s inner working in writing and demonstrate his/her strengths. The author borrows the term miscue from Goodman’s theory, and classifies the miscues according to one of the taxonomies of error analysis.This paper attempts to study the L1 influences on second language acquisition including both negative and positive transfers by analyzing miscues in middle school student writings. The subjects include 166 middle school students from Hangzhou New Century Foreign Language School, from Grade 7 to Grade 9.Three research questions are:(1) What are the types and patterns of miscues as evidenced in the writings of Chinese middle school students? (2) What miscues are evidences of positive transfers from L1, and what are examples of negative transfer from L1? (3) What are the reasons of some common miscues as evidenced by detailed analysis of these miscues?As an empirical study, this research involves three instruments, namely questionnaire, writing tasks, and transcripts. SPSS 16.0 is employed when the author analyzes the data. The method in this research is a combination of qualitative and quantitative studies.By analyzing the miscues, the author finds that all the miscues in students’ writings can be classified into 21 types and patterns, including the miscues in substance-level, text level and discourse level.18 types among them are interlingual miscues, and 3 types are intralingual miscues. According to the data, the number of interlingual miscues that arise from negative transfer decreases gradually. What’s more, the numbers of the miscues of each grade reveal that the writing abilities of the three grades become stronger by degrees. From the questionnaires, it is easy to see that most of the middle school students ignore the importance of writing, and their awareness of the differences between English and Chinese is not strong enough. About 60% of them have not realized the real relationship between Chinese writing ability and English writing ability. Fortunately, according to the questionnaires, most of the students tend to take advantage of L1 to facilitate their writings.Based on the research findings, the author puts forward several pedagogical implications at last, with the hope of minimizing the negative transfer and maximizing the positive transfer to improve the students’writing abilities by degrees.