A Study On The Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue On The English Writing

Since 1950s,language transfer has been one of the hottest issues in the Second Language Acquisition(SLA)field,which consists of positive transfer and negative transfer.Since English and Chinese respectively belong to different language families and cultures,Chinese English as Second Language(ESL)learners,especially the senior high students,encounter all kinds of difficulties caused by the negative transfer of their mother tongue,ie.Chinese.The senior 2 students from Wuhan Gangcheng No.4 Middle School,where the author works,were chosen as the subjects.The errors made in the three tasks:passage completing,proof reading and writing,which are good ways to examine students' writing competence,were collected as first-hand materials for the research.Employing the language transfer theory,contrastive analysis hypothesis and error analysis as its theoretical frame,this thesis attempts to examine the phenomenon of negative transfer in Chinese learner's English writing with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to serve pedagogical purposes.Four research questions are put forward as follows:1)At what levels does the negative transfer of mother tongue influence the English writing of senior 2 students from Wuhan Gangcheng No.4 Middle School?2)What are the main factors resulting in students' being influenced by the negative transfer of mother tongue?3)Are there any differences in the difficulties encountered by the students of different performances?4)What measures should English teachers take to teach students of different performances,helping them to get rid of such influence and produce English effectively after learning English knowledge?The author conducted a questionnaire survey in the first place to know to what extent the students were influenced by the negative transfer of mother tongue in their process of English writing and their attitudes towards teachers' teaching strategies of English writing.Then,under the guidance of the basic steps of error analysis,ie.Collection of a Sample of Learner Language,Identification of Error,Description of Errors,Explanation of Errors and Evaluation of Errors,offered by Corder(1984),the author analysed the 200 samples randomly chosen from two examinations.The author identified and recorded all the errors and classified them into interlingual errors and intralingual ones.After that,the author further classified the interlingual errors into more specific types and analyzed their causes.Afterwards,the author obtained the proportion of each error type and the student group influenced by each type,according to which the author designed a detailed teaching plan and several teaching methods to practice.The research revels that it is a common phenomenon that students think in Chinese and apply it mechanically into English during English writing,resulting in all kinds of errors in their writings.In the meanwhile,through further analysis on interlingual errors,the author notices that differences exist in the influences of negative transfer of mother tongue on different student groups.There are both similarities and differences in the errors made by students from different groups,which requires teachers to decide teaching plan and strategy according to students' characteristics.After illustrating the influences of negative transfer of mother tongue on students' English writing and the causes thoroughly,the author summarizes several pedagogical implications on how to deal with negative transfer of mother tongue from her own teaching practice:facing up to the phenomenon of negative transfer of mother tongue,attaching importance to the differences between Chinese and English,increasing language input of English,adopting framework writing,employing Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation practice,introducing length approach writing and enriching feedback forms of writing.In the process of teaching,the author finds that framework writing achieves great success in classes of all levels and the length approach writing is more suitable for classes with better English performances.