A Study Of The Effectiveness Of Modal Text Recitation On Reducing Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Junior High School English Writing

As one of the four basic language skills,writing is an important criteria to assess students' integrated pragmatic competence.However,negative transfer of mother tongue is a common phenomenon in students' English writing,which has become the main obstacle to improve their English writing competence.This is mainly due to the inadequacy of language input.As a traditional language learning method,modal text recitation is a very effective way of language input.Therefore,this thesis attempts to explore the effect of modal text recitation on negative transfer of mother tongue in students' English writing.Based on the theoretical basis of model text recitation,this thesis aims to answer the following two questions:(1)What types of errors are commonly made by the students in English writing due to negative transfer of mother tongue?(2)Can modal text recitation effectively reduce the common errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in students' English writing?In order to answer the above two questions,a 12-week experiment was carried out.The research subjects were 85 students in two parallel classes of Grade Eight in Shenqiu Siyuan Experimental School,Henan Province.These two classes were randomly chosen as the experimental class and the control class.Before the experiment,to have a comprehensive understanding of the current situation of students affected by negative transfer of mother tongue in their English writing,a pre-test and a questionnaire were given.During the experiment,students in the experimental class were required to recite two model texts one week on the basis of understanding,at the same time the author evaluated the students' recitation performance regularly.However,students in the control class were not required to do the recitation work.At the end of the experiment,students in both classes were given a post-test.To ensure the reliability and validity of the research,the two English writing tests were both chosen from the Senior High School Entrance Examination of Henan Province.Finally,the author counted the students' selections in the questionnaire survey,and collected the number of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in the pre-test and post-test respectively.All the data were put into statistical software SPSS 19.0 for scientific analysis.The results of the research show that :(1)there are 16 common types of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in students' English writing,which are mainly manifested in the four levels,namely morphology,lexis,syntax and discourse.Among them,morphological and syntactic errors account for a relatively higher proportion.(2)after 12-week model text recitation,the amounts of negative transfer errors made by the experimental class have all significantly decreased compared with that of the control class in the four levels.Furthermore,the amounts of negative transfer errors made by the students in the experimental class have significantly declined in the post-test compared with that in the pre-test from the four levels.In other words,model text recitation can effectively reduce the errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in junior high school students' English writing.This thesis has further verified the effectiveness of modal text recitation on reducing negative transfer of mother tongue in students' English writing,and also provides some implications for teachers on how to adopt model text recitation to help students reduce the interference of mother tongue in the process of English learning.In the end,the author points out the deficiencies of this study and give some suggestions for further researches.