A Study Of Negative Transfer On English Writing

English is increasingly important in modern China as it is compulsorily taught at all primary and middle schools and is the medium of instruction in some universities at present. Furthermore, of all the four basic language skills, writing is of vital importance in the process of English learning for it can develop students'critical thinking, enhance their ability to use target language and improve their proficiency in self-expression. While a proper command of writing ability has been ubiquitously recognized as crucial for successful second language acquisition, mastering English writing ability is far from easy for many L2 students and the situation is far from satisfying. Many results have proved that many Chinese ESL learners tend to think in Chinese before they write the English articles and that the surface structures of many interlanguage strings produced by the participants are identical or very similar to the normative sentence structures of the learners' first language. Besides, there is compelling evidence that language transfer plays a substantial role in the process and outcome of second language acquisition and can be traced in every English level. It is maintained that the level of interference in the learning of English language is correlated to the types and amount of errors committed by students. Actually, the learners'errors are very important in providing "insight into how far a learner has progressed in acquiring a language and showing how much more the learner needs to learn". Given that, error analysis is an effective way to analyze the negative transfer in English learning and the errors caused by negative transfer should not be ignored. Up to now, incalculable studies have focused on the substance, lexical, syntactic and discourse errors committed by Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students. However, what seems to be lacking is to what extent the proficiency level of students can affect the distribution of their errors and error types. Thus, the present study aims to investigate differences and similarities of the error types in the writings of both junior middle school students and Chinese EFL university students, studying what the relationship between negative language transfer and students' level of second language proficiency.The study was conducted in Chinese EFL learners who are native-speakers of Chinese from junior middle schools and the local college. Within them, the author selected participants from both groups with two distinct sub-levels that would be henceforth referred to as low-intermediate and advanced. The author selected an equal number of students from each sub-level randomly in order to facilitate a cross-level comparison in accordance with my research questions. The instruments included a demographic questionnaire, writing samples and interviews. The participants were given with the topic "is it a good idea to keep dogs as pets?" within the same time slots of 80 minutes both in Chinese and English. A word limit was set at about 80 and 200 words for students at the two proficiency levels respectively. Then a comparison between the interlanguage strings and equivalent strings in the learners' native language was carried out to find out whether cross-linguistic influences were at work. The demographic questionnaire was used to understand the subjects'mental process in second language writing. Finally, some of the participants were interviewed to reflect the possible reasons why they made mistakes in the items whose writing resembled Chinese structures.Results from the questionnaire and interviews confirms the involvement of L1 transfer. The results of the writing samples indicated that errors from the lexical level mainly included improper word choice, collations and derivation; errors from the syntactic level included word order, existential structures, agreement, and so on and those from the discourse level included periphrastic-topic constructions and sentence structure. Mother tongue influence is inevitably an important reason for the problems, but L2 language proficiency is also an important factor. In addition, the results showed that generally less proficient learners rely more on mother tongue and L1 interference is more evident in the less proficient levels. However, the number of errors does not totally decrease with the improvement of language proficiency. Results of such research would have considerable potential for raising students'awareness of Chinese negative transfer, alleviating English language teachers'workload and eventually quickening students' learning process.