A Study On Negative Transfer Of Chinese In Senior High School Students' English Writing In Inner Mongolia

English, as one of the compulsory courses for senior high school students in China, occupies a position of vital importance. And writing in English, as a written form of language output, plays a crucial role in the English learning process. As their L2 proficiency and inadequacy will both be reflected in writing, students' compositions can serve as feedback out of which we detect their errors and based on which we define their L2 competence. Negative transfer of the mother tongue is a kind of learner inadequacy that surface frequently in students' writing. As negative transfer seriously hinders learners' progress in their FL learning, I decide to make a case study into the phenomenon of negative transfer by observing the writing performance of some senior middle school students so as to find out ways to reduce negative transfer and thus improve students' writing abilities.This study mainly tries to answer these two questions:? What are the major types of errors caused by the Chinese negative transfer in the English compositions of Senior High School students? ? What are the respective sources of various types of negative transfer errors?This study is based on Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage theory as well as relevant domestic and foreign researches over the past few years. The methods adopted feature both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The author selects 60 writing samples at random out of 176 compositions written by students in second-year advanced classes of Jining No.1 Middle School. Then the errors of Chinese negative transfer appearing in their writings are singled out, classified and counted. The resulting statistics indicate that 73.8% of all errors in students'English writings are caused by Chinese negative transfer, and the errors fall into categories of morphology, lexicon, syntax, discourse and culture. Each error type is matched with specific examples and the causes of errors are analyzed. In order to ensure validity of the study, questionnaire is collected from 176 students (mentioned above) and an interview is held with 3 teachers sitting as interviewees to get a second opinion about the nature and causes of students' negative transfer errors. With the help of SPSS 17.0 software, the statistics of twenty multiple-choice questions in the questionnaire are worked out. They not only show that most of the students'English writings are affected by negative transfer of their mother tongue, but also rank the errors according to their frequency of appearance.The results show that the inherent differences between the two languages are the major source of errors in high school English writing. From this study we can see that Chinese negative transfer have a considerable impact on high school students'English learning, especially English writings. Although it is still impossible to thoroughly erase negative transfer, teachers can take effective measures to help students avoid it. Here are some pedagogical suggestions for teachers of English deduced from the case study:(1) Explaining new words in English; (2) Paying attention to both quantity and quality of language input; (3) Highlighting differences between Chinese and English; (4) Raising cross-cultural communication awareness.