The Research Of The Negative Transfer Of Chinese In High School Students’ English Writing

When we learn a foreign language our mother tongue has an effect on the learning effect more or less, which we call the phenomenon of mother tongue transfer, and the phenomenon can be divided into two groups—the positive transfer and negative transfer. The positive transfer mainly involves the improvement the mother tongue made to the target language while the negative transfer refers to the causing of target language interference. It is just the interference that brings much trouble to the senior students who have been deeply influenced by the mother tongue especially in their English compositions. The signs of Chinese can be seen everywhere, mostly happening in lexicon, the form of the word, syntax and even in the discourse. Undoubtedly, this situation causes great pressure to the students who are going to take the college entrance examination psychologically and spiritually. Meanwhile, a great difficult problem is also put forward before the English teachers of middle schools. Therefore, in this paper the researcher will make a further exploration of the effect on the foreign language study especially on the writing caused by the Chinese negative transfer, based on the research of the predecessors.The thesis is guided by some theories regarding the language transfer mainly including the theory of error analysis, contrast analysis theory and the interlanguage theory. The writer makes a long-term follow-up study on 127 students in senior three of Xinfeng No 2 Middle School in Jiangxi employing the methods of text analysis, investigation, interview, and comparative study and then analyzes mistakes in their compositions caused by the Chinese negative transfer. Furthermore the writer explains the causes hoping to raise some practical and useful measures in order to reduce the anxiety of the students when they are writing compositions and increase the possibility of getting high scores in the college entrance examination. At the same time, the writer hopes this research can contribute to the improvement of many English teachers’ teaching effect and level, promoting the development of local foreign language teaching.