A Study Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

The study of language transfer is mainly based on the theories of contrastive analysis,error analysis and interlanguage.These theories can help people better understand the phenomenon of mother tongue transfer in the foreign language learning,thus promoting the development of foreign language teaching.English and Chinese belong to two different language families,and there are significant differences in such aspects as morphology,syntax and vocabulary.The researches at home and abroad show that learners are influenced by negative transfer of mother tongue when they write English composition.Senior high school students have already accumulated a certain amount of English language knowledge,and they have already mastered and can use their mother tongue skillfully before learning English.Therefore,Chinese students will inevitably be influenced by the mother tongue in the English learning.This kind of influence will seriously hinder the improvement of students’ English ability.This research that is based on the theory of error analysis analyzes the types of errors in students’ writing caused by negative transfer of their mother tongue,and probes into the causes of the errors,so as to provide pertinent reference for teaching.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the errors in high school students’ English writing?(2)What are the types of errors resulted from negative transfer of mother tongue?(3)What are the sources of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in senior high school students’ writings?Due to the negative transfer of mother tongue in senior high school students’ English writing,the author has randomly selected 60 senior high school students and three English teachers from Xuzhou No.3 Middle School as research subjects.Students were assigned four compositions within one month,and then samples were collected to analyze the errors of negative transfer of mother tongue,and the information of two interviews were collected,and then the author drew the following conclusions: negative transfer of mother tongue is closely related to linguistic errors in senior high school students’ English writing,including lexical errors,syntax errors and morphology errors.First,from the perspective of lexical transfer,the most common errors in the use of words are misuse of word meaning,because most students translate them into English according to the corresponding meanings of Chinese words.Students do not have a thorough grasp of the rules and the context of using English words.Second,from the analysis of syntax transfer,the main reason for these errors is that they apply Chinese sentence structure to English sentences,ignoring the differences of syntactic rules between English and Chinese.Third,From the perspective of morphology transfer,English and Chinese belong to different language systems.English is a phonetic alphabet in which each word has different inflections,such as singular and plural nouns,countable and uncountable nouns,and non-finite verb forms of verbs.However,Chinese is an isolated language,and there is no morphological change.Students will make a lot of morphology transfer errors based on these two different characteristics.According to these findings and the relative theories,some pedagogical suggestions for English tenses are proposed.There is a hope that this research will be helpful for teachers’ writing teaching.