A Study On The Effectiveness Of Recitation Input To Alleviate The Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In High School Students' English Writing

Lexical,morphological and syntactic errors,sentence expressions that do not conform to the standard of English grammar and Chinese-English are often found in high school students’ English writing.To a large extent,it is affected by the negative transfer of mother tongue.Thus,the negative transfer of mother tongue has a big impact on the writing ability and level of senior high school students.The main reason is the lack of language input of high school students.As a traditional language learning method,recitation is a very effective way of language input.Based on Second Language Acquisition and Cognitive Psychology,this study intends to investigate the effects of recitation input in the alleviation of negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing for senior high school students,with the purpose of improving students’ English writing.There are two research questions: What’s the effect of recitation input in the alleviation of negative transfer of mother tongue among lexicon,syntax and discourse in English writing for senior high school students? What’s the students’ attitude towards recitation input in the alleviation of negative transfer of mother tongue?This study adopts experimental,text analysis,and interview methods.The experiment subjects are 100 students from a senior high school in Binzhou,Shandong Province.These subjects were divided into experimental class and controlled class.The experimental class was required to recite English texts,while the control class was not required to do this way.The reciting material is selected from New Concept English Book 2.The 10-week experiment aims to figure out what effect recitation input has on students’ English writing.At the beginning of the experiment,pre-test were administered in the two classes.After the experiment,the post-test and interview were also carried out among the subjects.Finally,mistakes made by negative transfer of mother tongue in the composition of two classes of students were analyzed in disparate levels:lexicon,syntax and discourse by SPSS17.0,which aims to investigate the effects of recitation input in the alleviation of negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing for high school students.The findings are as follows: firstly,the number of negative transfer of mother tongue in the experimental class was greatly reduced.The students in the experimental class have proved to be superior to those in the controlled class in terms of mistakes made by negative transfer of mother tongue among lexicon,syntax and discourse;secondly,the post-test of experimental class presents,the number of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in terms of lexical,syntactic and textual levels is obviously declining,especially in the discourse level.Thirdly,most students think recitation input can help them reduce the negative transfer of mother tongue interms of lexical,syntactic and textual levels,however,a very few students think that recitation input had little effect on overcoming the negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing.The above results can be inferred that recitation input is proved to be conductive to the negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing.To some extent,the study enriches the experimental study of recitation input and negative transfer of mother tongue and the thesis at last points out the limitations,the implications of the study and suggestions for future studies.