A Study On The Correlation Of Negative Transfer Of The Native Language And Tense Errors In English Writing Of Junior High School Students

The negative transfer of mother tongue has always been a common phenomenon in second language acquisition.The previous learned knowledge will definitely exert great influence on the acquisition and use of second language.On the premise of reserving some native language knowledge,therefore,Chinese middle school students are bound to be affected by native language knowledge and experience.Junior high school students are still at the initial stage of learning English.With the limited language learning environment and language use ability,they are vulnerable to the interference of mother tongue.Because of the great differences between English tense and Chinese tense system,it is quite difficult for students to completely understand the tense system which is greatly different from their native language tense system as to result in many tense errors.Tense has always been an important and difficult part in the middle school English teaching.One reason is that there are great differences between English tense and Chinese tense system.The former uses some function words or adverbs to indicate different time without the changing of the verb form while the latter is relatively complicated with many types of English tenses with the corresponding morphological change.The vast differences between Chinese tense and English tenses severely block the improvement of students' English writing level.Based on the negative transfer theory and error analysis theory,the author makes an empirical study on the two parallel classes in Dalian Chuntian junior high school.The author classifies tense errors occurred in the junior students' English writing and inquires into the potential reasons to put forward the interest-oriented English teaching strategy.This study adopts the instruments of English writing and questionnaire to inquiry into middle school students' tense errors caused by negative transfer.The combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods make the research much more persuasive.The author selects sixty students who are from the two parallel classes in Dalian Chuntian middle school as the subjects.One class is randomly considered as the experimental class while the other is regarded as the controlled class.All the subjects take part in the composition pretest and post-test,while only the experimental class participates in the questionnaire before and after the experiment.The thesis aims at solving three problems:1)What are common tense errors made by junior high school students in English writing? 2)Why do they often make tense errors in the English writing? 3)How are these tense errors caused by negative transfer reduced in the students' English writing?The results of the compositions indicate that the tense errors caused by negative transfermainly concentrate on four tenses: simple present tense,simple past tense,simple future tense and the present perfect tense.The main reasons of the language transfer lie in the different grammatical rules and different culture and thinking modes between the Chinese and western.In order to get rid of the Chinese interference,the author looks to her classroom experience and adopts the interest-orientated teaching method to promote students' English tense learning.In the teaching process,the author employs the contrastive analysis to promote students to have a better understanding about the differences between English tense and Chinese tense.In addition,the author encourages students to enlarge the target language input to cultivate their English thinking patterns.Through the empirical research,the new teaching methods are proven to be effective which are the important enlightenment to English teachers in junior high school in English tense teaching.