An Empirical Study On The Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Senior High School Students' English Writing

Mother tongue transfer has been a widely studied problem in second language acquisition research since the end of the nineteenth century. Mother tongue transfer refers to the effect of the mother tongue in second language learners' target language learning. Mother tongue transfer is split into positive transfer and negative transfer.Positive transfer promotes target language learning while negative transfer impedes target language learning. Language transfer studies have become increasingly profound, and those studies have made great contributions to foreign language teaching.English writing is a comprehensive measure way to inspect learner's English competence. However, Chinese learners' English writing, to a great extent, is affected by negative transfer of the mother tongue. To help English teachers improve their writing teaching and help students to avoid negative transfer of mother tongue in their writing as much as possible, the author desires to study the reasons why the negative transfer of mother tongue causes errors in senior high school students' writing.This research applied 122 students who came from Dong Jiang senior high school grade one as research subjects. Research data was gathered from the 122students' writing samples, questionnaires and interviews. Next, the author analyzed and discussed these data with the guidance of contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage theory. The study found out that two thirds of the errors in students' writing were results of negative transfer of the mother tongue. Negative transfer of mother tongue affects writing in disparate levels: grammatical morpheme, lexicon,syntax and discourse. Syntax is affected most by the negative transfer of mother tongue. The reasons why Chinese students are influenced by mother tongue come from three aspects are following. First, Chinese and English are owned by different language families. There is not just a far distance between mother tongue and target language but also a complexity of English itself. Second, most of English teachers,under the pressure of heavy curriculums and teaching plans, cannot pay enough attention to correct student's errors that are caused by the negative transfer of mothertongue. Third, students have built a complete mother tongue before English learning,and they lack adequate input in pure native language environment. At the end of this thesis, it put forward a few suggestions to English teaching according to the findings,and the author hopes that these suggestions can be useful in helping students to avoid negative transfer of mother tongue and improving students' writing competence.