An Investigative Research On Mother Tongue Negative Transfer In English Writing In Middle School

As a language output skill,writing has been paid more and more attention by teachers and students.During the process of English writing,the fact that students are inevitably influenced by the mindset of Chinese leads to the students' poor writing abilities.A lot of Chinglish is used in the composition which fails in accord with the habit of English expression.It is obvious that mother tongue negative transfer exists unavoidably in English writing,which becomes the main obstacle of improving writing ability.In this thesis,the author makes a further survey on the phenomena that the students' English writing are influenced by the mother tongue negative transfer in middle school to explore the beneficial suggestions to the problems.The following issues will be discussed in the thesis:1.What are the differences of dependence on mother tongue for students with different English levels?2.What types of errors caused by mother tongue negative transfer exist in student's English writing in middle school?3.What are the possible reasons for the errors which caused by mother tongue negative transfer in English writing?The survey was carried out for one month in No.31 Middle School of Zhuanghe,Liaoning Province.According to the last semester examination scores,237 students in six classes were selected from ten classes in Grade Nine,including two top-level classes(Class 3 and Class 7),two middle-level classes(Class 5 and Class 10),and two low-level classes(Class 2 and Class 6).The number of students is 39,40,41,39,40 and 38 respectively.Questionnaires,interview and writing tests were used to investigate the differences of dependence on mother tongue for students with different English levels,the error types and reasons which caused by mother tongue negative transfer in English writing.The result of the survey indicates that the higher the English level is,the less the dependence on mother tongue will be.In addition,the author summarized the existed errors from four aspects----grammar,vocabulary,sentence and discourse error.Then,the reasons which caused by mother tongue negative transfer were concluded.The first reason is seeking assistance from mother tongue in the process of English writing.Second,students lack basic English knowledge.Third,they lack practices and professional training.The last reason is not considering the differences between English and Chinese.Finally,the author put forward some suggestions and implications for English writing teaching to improve students' writing abilities and assist teachers to achieve better teaching effect.There are still some deficiencies in the research which needs to be further improved.