A Study On Negative Transfer Of Chinese In High School English Writing From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

In the field of second language acquisition,conceptual transfer is a new emerging theoretical result of language transfer,which focuses on the impact of deep nonlinguistic conceptual representations on learners' mother tongue and second language from a cognitive perspective.Drawing on conceptual transfer as the theoretical basis,this study regards English compositions from two classes of a senior high school as the research materials and chiefly adopts quantitative analysis supplemented by quantitative analysis to analyze errors in Chinese students' writing aiming to clarify the types of errors made by students and dig out the underlying reasons under the influences of negative mother tongue transfer.This paper mainly answers the following three questions:(1)What are the manifestations of negative mother tongue transfer in high school Chinese students' English writing?(2)Which conceptual transfer domains are involved by these manifestations?(3)What are the underlying causes of the negative transfer?The results show that:(1)The phenomenon of negative transfer of mother tongue in students' writing is usually manifested at three levels: lexical,syntax and discourse.Among them,most errors are at the syntactic level,including tense errors,misuse of passive sentences,and pivotal sentences.(2)As far as conceptual transfer is concerned,the interference of mother tongue concepts mainly involves three conceptual domains including OBJECT,NUMBER and TIME,and is concentrated on the lexical and syntactic levels.(3)The interference of mother tongue in English writing is mostly the result of the influence of the similarities and differences of L1 and L2 concepts.Students tend to misuse the concepts of the mother tongue in English writing,improperly combining it with the form of the target language.In addition,students mistakenly construct the shared-concepts of the mother tongue and the target language.These two factors lead to the negative transfer of mother tongue.This thesis enriches the study of English writing in China,and further validates the necessity of related conceptual transfer research for understanding second language learners' English writing.At the same time,this study has certain enlightenment significance to Chinese English writing teaching.Teachers are suggested to dig deep into the causes of errors and analyze the fundamental problems in students' English writing from the perspective of conceptual transfer.Strengthening the input of similarities and differences between English and Chinese concepts is an effective way to avoid implicit and unauthentic use of the target language.