An Intervention Study On The Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In English Writing Of Vocational College Students

As for the five aspects of English learning: listening,speaking,reading,translating and writing,listening and reading are language inputs,while speaking,translating and writing are language outputs.Writing is relatively the most difficult for vocational college students.From the examination-oriented perspective,the rate of loss of writing is the highest in all the English question types.But it can also reflect the thinking,psychology and problems of students using second language to the most extent.There are many reasons why writing is the weakest point for vocational college students: one reason is that because of the low allocation of writing teaching hours and the difficulty of correcting and evaluating students’ writing,some teachers pay less attention to and don’t emphasize the teaching of English writing;another reason is the weak vocabulary and grammar foundation of students and the lack of English writing practice.But from the root of this problem,the reason is that Chinese is already handy,and Chinese thinking has long been preconceived and deeply rooted.As a second language,the learning and use of English is bound to be influenced by the mother tongue “Chinese”.As two languages belonging to different language families,Chinese and English have great differences in various aspects under different cultural backgrounds,and these differences will surely have a negative impact on Chinese students’ English learning and mastery,and play a role of interference and hindrance,that is,negative transfer.However,there is still a relative lack of research on the influence of negative transfer of mother tongue on vocational college students’ English writing.Based on previous studies and from the perspective of negative transfer theory of mother tongue,this paper is designed to analyzes the errors in the essays written by 15 vocational college students,who are randomly selected from two parallel classes of the Grade One of a college,one is selected to be the experimental class and another is the control class,which consists of 37 students each,to identify,describe and classify the errors,and to make relevant interviews with the same 15 students to justify which errors are caused by the negative transfer of their mother tongue.Based on the theory of negative transfer of the mother tongue,in this paper,ways of error analysis and contrastive analysis are used to analyze the errors appear in the vocational college students’ CET-4 composition before and after the teaching intervention,and the research paradigm of combining qualitative and quantitative research are adopted.And each class is divided into three groups:the better score group,the normal score group and the poor score group according to the students’ English scores of their college entrance examination.This paper is aimed to probes into the influence of negative transfer of mother tongue on the writing of vocational college students.All analyses of statistical data and research results indicate that in the process of English writing the vocational college students are indeed interfered by the negative transfer of their mother tongue Chinese and the mistakes in their English writing are mainly caused by the negative transfer of their mother tongue Chinese.All the statistical data of the mistakes caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in the pretests and post-tests of the control class and the experimental class show that pragmatic errors and cohesion and coherence errors account for a prominent proportion of English errors in vocational college students’ English writing caused by negative transfer of mother tongue.And all the statistical data,whether considered in the dimension of the change of the error numbers or the dimension of wrong word ratios,lead to the conclusions that the overall effects on the experimental class is more obvious than those on the control class and the teaching intervention methods and teaching strategies which are based on the theory of negative transfer of mother tongue are effective.The intervention effect on the better score group of the experimental class is obvious;the intervention effect on the normal score group of the experimental class is obvious in general;and the intervention effect on the poor score group of the experimental class is not obvious enough.According to the effect of the intervention,some corresponding countermeasures and reasonable and feasible way to improve to the ability of vocational college students’ English writing are to strengthen comparison of the differences between English and Chinese in every English teaching link to reduce the interference caused by negative transfer of mother tongue and to cultivate vocational college students’ English thinking in the process of English teaching.