A Study On The Effect Of First Language Thinking On Negative Transfer Of Syntax In High Schools Students’ English Continuation Writing

In the field of the second language(L2)acquisition,first language(L1)thinking has drawn great attention.Due to the differences in the syntactic rules between Chinese and English,Chinese students are easily affected by L1 thinking and make errors when learning English,especially in the process of English writing.Syntactic errors are one of the most important errors caused by the negative transfer of Chinese.According to English Curriculum Criteria for Regular High School(2017 Edition),the writing part mainly examines students’ writing ability,including the fluency,accuracy and decency of the writing.Writing teaching is an indispensable part of English teaching in high schools.Thus,it is of great significance to research how to help teachers correctly understand the negative transfer of Chinese in the syntactic aspect for reducing the L1 transfer interference with students.Based on theories of language transfer and error analysis,research methods of text analysis and thinking aloud are employed to study the interference of students’ negative transfer of Chinese in the syntactic errors of English continuation writing.66 students participated in the research,all of whom were high school students from two parallel classes in Guangzhou.This research aims to investigate student’s output results and the output process in English writing,and two research questions are formulated as follows.1.What are the types of syntactic errors caused by the negative transfer of Chinese in the English continuation writing of high school students?2.What is the relationship between the types of syntactic errors caused by the negative transfer in Chinese and L1(Chinese)use in L2(English)writing?The collected data are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively.First,the researcher conducted the qualitative analysis of syntactic errors in 56 compositions on continuation writing tasks from students,which were caused by the negative transfer of Chinese.Then 5 participants were involved in the thinking aloud research to study the correlation between the types of syntactic errors caused by the negative transfer and the L1(Chinese)use in L2(English)writing by the Spearman correlation analysis.The major findings of the present research are summarized as follows.First,from the errors analysis of compositions on the continuation writing,errors in the tenses and voice are the main types of errors caused by the negative transfer of Chinese syntactic rules in the continuation writing task for high school students,followed by multiple predicates and run-on sentences,lack of linking verbs,errors in articles,errors in word order,lack of subjects,subject-predicate disagreement,lack of objects.Second,the analysis results from the research on thinking aloud show that there is a negative correlation between the L1(Chinese)use in L2(English)writing and syntactic errors including multiple predicates,errors in word order,lack of subjects,lack of objects,lack of linking verbs,subject-predicate disagreement,among which errors in word order and subject-predicate disagreement are the high negative correlation.Based on the above research results and the teaching experience from other front-line teachers,the researcher puts forward some teaching suggestions for English teachers to help teacher enhance the understanding of the negative transfer in Chinese syntactic rules and improve the writing ability of high school students in the English continuation writing.