A Study Of Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In English Major's Writing

This paper,based on the theory of language transfer,aims to study the negative transfer of mother tongue in the English writing.The methods of contrastive analysis and error analysis are used in the analysis of the writing errors by English majors so as to explore some countermeasures to overcome the interference of mother tongue to the target language and reduce or avoid the phenomenon of mother tongue negative transfer.Main research questions are as follows:1.What's the proportion of negative transfer of mother tongue errors in the English compositions written by English majors?2.Which are the aspects of errors produced by negative transfer of mother tongue in English majors' writing and what are the reasons?3.To reduce the phenomenon of negative transfer of mother tongue,what countermeasures should be taken in teaching?This study is conducted with the combination of writing samples and questionnaire.The research subjects are the sophomore English majors from Qingdao University of Science and Technology.The students' argumentative writings are chosen as samples for case study.Some suggestions are put forward after a careful analysis and exploration of the reasons that causes the different categories of errors.It is expected that the findings will be helpful for English writing and teaching.The result of study shows that up to 70% of the students' errors are due to the negative transfer of mother tongue.The errors can be roughly categorized into four: vocabulary,syntax,morphology and discourse.The reason of vocabulary error is ascribed to the lack of awareness of negative transfer of mother tongue;Syntax and morphology errors are mainly caused by weak mastery of different characteristics between two languages;while discourse errors are due to different life styles,thinking mode,values and cultural norms which make a large frequency of negative transfer errors,and after all,the lack of cross-cultural awareness is dominant.According to the study,it is suggested that teachers should strengthen the training of basic language skills in English teaching,increasing input and application of the vocabulary to improve students' language ability,which can raise the awareness of negative transfer of mother tongue.Besides,try to create good language environment in order to let student expose to a large amount of authentic materials which can help students reduce or avoid the negative transfer of Chinese holistic thinking mode and have a better grasp of the different language characteristics.In addition,the input of English culture should be stressed for the improvement of students' cross-cultural awareness and for the final purpose of enhancing their ability in English writing.