A Study Of First Language Negative Transfer In College English Writing

Language transfer has been one of the most important issues in second language acquisition and foreign language teaching.It is an obvious phenomenon that learners' mother tongue or first language will exert great influence on the process of second language acquisition.And this phenomenon can be called language transfer.The facilitative role is called positive transfer,while the interference of mother tongue is called negative transfer.Of the five skills of English learning,namely listening,speaking,reading,writing and translating,writing is considered to be an integrated part that can reflect English proficiency.Many former studies indicated that negative transfer of mother tongue was an important factor which would influence foreign language writing.This thesis firstly aims to analyze the specific manifestations of first language negative transfer in college English writing.And then it aims to study the manifestation differences in different types of writing and in the writings of students with different English proficiency levels by dividing the writing tasks into expositive and argumentative writing and the participants into high,middle and low proficiency levels.This thesis took 66 non-English major students from two intact classes in Soochow University as the research participants and the theory of language transfer and error analysis as guidance.An expositive writing and an argumentative writing were conducted to examine the transfer errors in college English writing.The participants were assigned to different groups according to their language proficiency level in the course of data analysis to detect whether this variable makes any difference.Through the study,it is found that first language negative transfer is an unavoidable factor which influences English writing.Among all transfer errors,errors in lexis are the most prominent,followed by syntactic and discourse errors.According to the writing samples,the manifestations of transfer errors in the aspect of lexis can be divided into 9 types.They are errors in articles,nouns,prepositions,conjunctions,verbs,pronouns,part of speech,assumed synonyms and collocations.The manifestations of transfer errors in the aspect of syntax can be divided into 8 types.They are errors in agreement,omission,word order,erial verb constructions,run-on sentence,relative clauses,negation and literal translation.And the manifestations of transfer errors in the aspect of discourse can be divided into errors in using the second personal pronoun you and errors in discourse structure.The study also finds that students make more transfer errors in expositive writing than in argumentative writing.However,lexical errors are the most prominent in both expositive writing and argumentative writing,followed by syntactic and discoursal errors.In terms of language proficiency level,the study finds that lexical errors are the most prominent in the writings of all proficiency levels.In addition,low-level English learners are more likely to make transfer errors than middle and high-level English learners.The study indicates that lexis should be more stressed during the process of English teaching and learning and that students should work together with teachers to improve their English proficiency in different ways.The author also summarizes some limitations of the study at the end of the thesis according to the research procedures and the data analysis results,trying to provide some referential suggestions for future studies.