An Investigative Study On The Influence Of Gender On Negative Transfer Of The First Language In Senior High School English Writing

Writing,as one of the four basic skills of English,is a way to test students' English comprehensive proficiency.Because Chinese and English belong to different language families,Chinese usually students made many errors caused by negative transfer of the first language in the process of English writing learning.Scholars and English teachers have done a lot of researches on how to reduce the influence of negative transfer on language learning.However,researches on the impact of gender differences are insufficient.Therefore,this thesis starts with the following two questions for research:Question1: What is the percentage of errors caused by negative transfer ofthe first language in the total number of errors in senior highschool English compositions? In terms of lexicon,syntax anddiscourse,which aspect has the largest number of errors?Question2: Is there any difference of negative transfer between male andfemale students in senior high school English writing ? If so,isthere any difference of negative transfer in between lexicon,syntax and discourse in English compositions?The research participants of this survey are 100 male students and 100 female students from the high,medium and low levels of the second grade of Jingwei Middle School in Yuci District,Jinzhong City,Shanxi Province.At the same time,3English teachers also participated in this research.In this study,quantitative and qualitative research methods were used to collect 200 English compositions and conduct individual interviews with some students and teachers.Finally,SPSS was used to analyze and discuss the test data and drew a conclusion.The results show that 72.93% of errors were caused by negative transfer of the first language.Among them,the syntax negative transfer account for 50.69% in the errors of negative transfer of the first language;there are significant differences in the negative transfer of the first language between male and female students.From three aspects,there are significant differences in lexicon and syntax between male and female students,but there is no significant difference in discourse.Based on the aboveresults,the author puts forward some different methods based on gender to help teachers improve English writing teaching.