A Study Of Chinese Negative Transfer On English Vocabulary Acquisition Of Senior High School Students

Wilkins (1972) once noted that "One can express limited information without grammar, while one can express nothing without vocabulary". Vocabulary plays a decisive role in language learning. In the process of English teaching and learning, teachers spent lots of time introducing a large amount of words and students devoted their time to memorizing words and expressions or rote drilling, yet the result of their effort may have tuned out rather unsatisfactory. Therefore this research aims to figure out the causes that lay hidden in this phenomenon. Based on Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage theories, the author made a research on transfer errors of vocabulary to work out how and to what extent negative transfer of Chinese interfere students'vocabulary learning. This thesis aims at answering the following questions:First, what is the main obstacle in senior high school students' vocabulary learning?Second, what are the main types of vocabulary errors resulting from Chinese negative transfer in senior high school students' vocabulary learning? And what kinds of errors have the highest frequency?Third, what are the causes of students' vocabulary errors from the negative transfer of Chinese?The subjects are 100 grade1 students chosen from four different classes in the seventh senior high school of Dong Guan. English composition, questionnaire and interview are used in this study. The subjects are first asked to write an English composition on the given topic then the author collects 96 valid samples for further error analysis. The errors from students' writing are categorized and analyzed in detail. The questionnaire and interview are done after the subjects finished their writing to figure out the causes of the vocabulary errors from Chinese negative transfer. The data from the English composition and questionnaire are processed by SPSS.16. Based on the results of the data analysis, the major findings of the research are as follows:Firstly, there are two types of errors in their writing:intralingual error and interlingual error. The interlingual errors caused by negative transfer of Chinese take up the proportion of 61.7%, which means that negative transfer is the main obstacle in senior high school students' vocabulary learning.Secondly, four types of vocabulary errors from Chinese negative transfer are found: errors on words meaning, errors on part of speech, errors on collocation and errors on morphology. They can be further subdivided into 11 kinds of common vocabulary errors.Thirdly, the interference of negative transfer of Chinese perform most obviously in the part of speech and the errors on collocation of verb+noun occur most frequently.Fourthly, the causes of vocabulary errors from negative transfer are concluded: cultural differences, limited awareness towards the differences between the two languages, unscientific ways of learning English vocabularies and simplex methods of vocabulary teaching.Based on the findings, this study also put forward some implications for vocabulary teaching and learning in senior high school. Students should memorize and use English words in the context. As for teachers, they should attach importance to the teaching of the differences between English and Chinese vocabulary and enhance the learning of English collocation so that students can overcome the negative transfer of Chinese and lay a solid foundation in linguistic knowledge.