A Study Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer And Relevant Teaching Strategies In Junior High School English Writing

Generally speaking, learners always start to learn second language on the basis of complete mastery of the native language. Learners’ second language acquisition process will be affected inevitably by the learners’ established system of their mother tongue and this influence is two-fold. When the regulation rules of the target language are similar to the native language rules, there would be some positive transfers to help students learn better. On the contrary, when some differences happen between these two languages, it will produce negative transfer to hinder the students’ second language learning. And negative transfer often tend to cause linguistic mistakes and learning difficulties.Although it is considered as one of the four language skills, writing investigate the learner’s comprehensive language ability. So the seemingly simple writing is always dotted with highest error rates. And for the majority of English learners, it is not an easy issue to write by using the target language smoothly and correctly. Not only because they don’t figure out how to describe, how to narrate and how to express, but also these learners always are afraid of writing and have less confidence in language writings. This kind of phenomenon has been particularly prominent among middle school students. On the one hand, the process of English learning of Chinese middle school students is affected by Chinese thinking mode, cultural customs and studying environment, and the differences between these two languages cause much difficulties and obstacles. On the other hand, because of the intensive courses with more content and less class time, thus many English teachers put more weight on the teaching of language knowledge instead of developing students’ language writing competence.This thesis consists of six chapter,and proceeds in the following ways: Chapter one gives a brief introduction to the background, significance, purpose and structure of this thesis; chapter two reports theliterature review of this study;chapter three introduces the theoretical foundation, including a brief review of the error analysis theory, inter-language theory, transfer theory and the researches carried out so far at home and aboard; chapter four introduces the experimental subjects, methods and procedures; chapter five do the data analysis, and the related theories are used to do text analysis toward the junior students’ English writing according to the materials collected, then examine whether those teaching methods mentioned above benefit for overcoming mother tongue transfer in junior students’ English writing; The last part of the paper summarizes the study, puts forward the effective teaching methods, concludes the limitations that should be overcome and finally gives suggestions for further research.