A Study Of Negative Syntactic Transfer In Senior High School English Writing

The learning of English syntax knowledge in senior high school is an extension of learning in the compulsory education stage.Senior high school students should further consolidate and appropriately apply the syntactic knowledge learned in the compulsory education stage through various English learning and practical activities in a richer context,and learn to understand and apply new syntactic knowledge in the context for further development.By using a corpus and error analysis theory,we can investigate and study common errors in students’ compositions,in order to seek ways and countermeasures to improve both the teaching of writing for teachers and the English writing abilities of students.Based on the English writing corpus from a senior high school in M County,this paper analyzes the English compositions of senior high school students from three grades in the school.According to the labeling method for syntactic errors in the Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC),there are three types of errors caused by negative syntactic transfer,namely,run-on sentences,subordination and structural deficiency.Subsequently,based on the data from the senior high school students’ English writing corpus,an analysis of negative syntactic transfer errors in senior high school students’ English writing is conducted to study the following three issues: 1.What is the distribution of negative syntactic transfer errors in senior high school English writing? 2.What are the main influencing factors of negative syntactic transfer in senior high school English writing? 3.How should teachers and students avoid negative syntactic transfer to improve their English writing teaching and learning abilities? According to the statistical results,there are 456 syntactic errors in senior high school students’ compositions,including 139 run-on sentences,accounting for 30% of the total number of errors.There are mainly two types of sentences: one is fused sentence,and the other is comma splice.There are 255 subordination structure errors,accounting for 56% of the total number of errors.The main manifestations of subordinate structural errors are the misuse and omission of related words,as well as errors in the relationship between subject and subordinate sentences,including the formation of separate sentences and the parallel of subordinate sentences.There are 62 structural deficiency errors,accounting for 14% of the total number of errors.The main manifestations are subject-predicate inconsistencies,voice errors,and word order errors.Finally,suggestions for avoiding negative syntactic transfer errors in English teaching and writing are proposed from the perspectives of both teachers and students.Teachers should pay attention to the comparison between English and Chinese and strengthen syntactic training in teaching;Increase English input and output;Focus on contextualisation and positive guidance.Students should have a deep understanding of syntax and practice English;Strengthen English input and output;Learn writing skills and focus on post writing modifications.