| In the past decades,the negative transfer(NT)of the mother tongue has received considerable attention in the field of English learning and teaching.Chinese college students have made all kinds of mistakes in their English writing caused by the negative transfer of the mother tongue,which has attracted many attentions in the current NT research.Most of the previous studies mainly explored the impacts of the NT of mother tongue on English writing of high school students or non-English major students,whereas few studies focused on English majors.The present study aims to explore the impacts of the NT of mother tongue on English majors’ writing performance from the perspective of language transfer theory with the approaches of comparative analysis and error analysis employed.By adopting the quantitative and qualitative methods,a total of 139 compositions on four different topics,from 68 English major freshmen in a key university in Shaanxi Province,are selected as samples for the analysis to investigate the impacts of the NT of the mother tongue on students’ English writing.Hence,two research questions have been put forward:(1)What are the writing errors caused by the negative transfer of mother tongue in English major students’ compositions?(2)How do these errors affect English majors’ writing performance? The means of questionnaire and interview are also employed in this study and the results of which are carefully analyzed.The major findings in the present study are summarized as follows:(1)Writing errors caused by NT of mother tongue are found at morphological,lexical,syntactic,and discourse levels.(2)As showed in statistics there is a total number of 756 writing errors.The writing Errors at syntactical level account for the most substantial proportion of 41.67%,mainly presented in the form of absence of subjects,subject predicate inconsistency,and careless use of word order and misuse of tense.The errors found at morphological level take up a proportion of 12.04%,mainly caused by misuse of nouns.The lexical errors,due to the improper use of prepositions,have the least proportion of 9.66%.The discourse error lies in the illogical coherence,occupying 10.45%.(3)The questionnaire has indicated that English major students heavily rely on the strategies such as word selection and sentence combination from their mother tongue when writing English compositions.(4)The interview has conveyed that students cannot better understand the differences between Chinese and English and lack the awareness of the effects of the NT of mother tongue,thus greatly affected in their writing consciously or unconsciously.The present study has implications in English writing teaching.Firstly,teachers should help students distinguish the differences between English and Chinese and beware of the impacts of the NT of mother tongue on their writing performance.Secondly,teachers should also guide students to analyze and correct the writing errors in order to improve students’ English writing ability. |
