Influence Of Chinese Negative Transfer On Learning English Plurals In High Schools

Language transfer,a common phenomenon in foreign language learning,can be divided into positive transfer and negative transfer.During second language acquisition,the negative transfer tends to emerge due to the impact of mother tongue.And in the acquisition of the grammatical features,the negative transfer is almost unavoidable for Chinese English learners,so it has been a focus of SLA study in China.Most of the relevant literature on negative transfer focus on such lexical aspects as prepositional collocation,definite and indefinite articles,verb tense and voice,as well as such syntactic aspects as attributive clauses and subject-verb agreement.Only a little of literature,however,focus on that of English noun plurals,in which the vast majority takes the adults and children as subjects,while little involves high school students.Indeed,English noun plural poses difficulties for Chinese learners.This is mainly caused by its distinction of singular and plural forms and that of singular and plural concepts.Some nouns are singular in forms but plural in concepts;some are plural in forms but singular in concepts;some can represent both concepts.This thesis applies Contrastive Analysis Theory,Error Analysis,and Markedness Theory into a research of Chinese negative transfer on learning English noun plurals to high school students.The research questions in this paper are as follows:(1)What are the main errors of high school students in learning English noun plurals?(2)What types of negative transfer cause the errors?(3)In what ways can teachers help students reduce the negative transfer?The research selects 96 students from two classes in the first grade of Jigang Senior High School as subjects,with 48 students in each class.The research is conducted both qualitatively and quantitatively.An analysis of data from test and interview finds the following main errors: absence of plural marker-s,spelling errors,difficulties in distinguishing countable and uncountable nouns,arbitrary equivalence of singular and plural meanings,use of-s to some collective nouns,and use of a/an to plural nouns.It also finds that the negative transfer occurs mainly at lexical and syntactic levels.The research concludes with some suggestions for teachers’ teaching and students’ learning of English plurals respectively.