A Study Of Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue On English Writing By Junior High School Students

Writing,as a basic language skill,is one of the important indicators to evaluate students' English comprehensive ability.Under the teachers' analysis and discussion on students' writings of senior high school examination in recent years,it is not difficult to find that students will apply their native language thinking and habits into English writing while ignoring the particularity of English writing,which leads to writing errors,that is,the negative transfer of their mother tongue MTNT(Mother Tongue Negative Transfer).It is found that MTNT on second language writing is inevitable and has become the main obstacle of second language writing through the studies of many scholars.On the basis of the research results and relevant theories of language transfer at home and abroad,this thesis collects a large number of errors in junior high school students' English writing by combining the theories of linguistic Contrastive Analysis,Error Analysis and Interlanguage.How to reduce the influence of MTNT on junior middle school students' English writing is also discussed through a further analysis.A number of compositions were collected and the total amount of errors occurred in the compositions were counted by the author at first.Then,the author classified all the errors and calculated the percentage of all kinds of errors in the total amount under the guidance of Error Analysis so as to make a concrete analysis of these errors.Finally,the author verifies the data analysis and conclusion of the study by issuing questionnaires to the students.At the same time,through the interview with teachers and students,this research tries to sum up effective strategies for teachers to effectively reduce the influence of MTNT on writing in writing teaching.The results of this study show that the errors in English writings of junior highschool students resulting from MTNT are mainly embodied in four aspects: substance,lexicon,syntax and discourse.The main causes of these errors are the differences of thinking patterns and culture between English and Chinese.The results of interviews indicate that teachers and students can reduce the MTNT through analyzing the differences between Chinese and English expressions and designing effective teaching methods,which can gradually cultivate students to form the habit of English thinking from the perspective of input and output.It is important to strengthen the writing training of junior high school students from the aspects of lexicon,syntax and discourse so as to improve the English writing quality of junior high school students.