A Research On Negative Transfer Of Chinese Sentence Patterns In Non-English Major Students' English Compositions

The negative transfer of Chinese sentence patterns in Chinese non-major students' English compositions reflects negative transfer of Chinese thought patterns. Contrastive analysis of different thought patterns in these two languages should be applied in English teaching to help the students raise awareness of English thought patterns to improve their writing proficiency.To start with, the paper introduces the definition of transfer by Odlin(1989) and four types of transfer. Views about negative transfer have undergone considerable change. Initially, negative transfer was viewed as interference. It was assumed that errors produced by the learners were caused by interference. However, the empirical tests proved that not all errors were caused by interference. The tests showed that interference plays little role in L2 learning and it is just a communication strategy and should be ignored. However, this point minimizes the role of L1. A cognitive view states that L1 as previous experience exists in fixed probabilistic pattern in learners' cognitive schema. L1 is more easily activated than L2. What's more, in learning L2 the student's cognitive schema is reorganized on the basis of the original schema. They tend to extend existing L1 rule categories and then L1 negative transfer appears.Three kinds of different sentence patterns are discussed respectively. The first is Chinese topic-comment sentence and English subject-predicate sentence. The second is a Chinese sentence with two or more verbs and an English sentence with a great number of abstract nouns and prepositions. The third is Chinese paratactic sentence and English hypotactic sentence. A statistics is conducted here to calculate the frequency of three kinds of erroneous sentences typical of Chinese sentencepatterns in non-major students' English compositions. From the data analysis, we find that the frequency of the paratactic sentence in the sophomore group appears no higher than that in other two groups. After the analysis of the data, I have an interview with some students in three classes on how much Chinese they thought they were using in their minds while they were writing in English. Among the interviewed students, over 91% reported that they first thought in Chinese and then translated the ideas into English. It further proved that the students transferred Chinese sentence patterns into their English writing.Erroneous sentences in these students' compositions are caused by negative transfer of Chinese sentence patterns. As sentence patterns are decided by their thinking patterns, this negative transfer is actually that of thought patterns. Negative transfer of topic-comment, multi-predicate and paracratic sentences is in fact that of global, imaginational and dialectical thought patterns. Those students composed English writings in Chinese global, imaginational and dialectical thought patterns, which are unfamiliar and unacceptable by English natives, for English thought patterns are analytic, abstract and formal. Influenced greatly by Chinese thoughts, students focused on the whole meaning and gave a concrete description by means of a series of verbs. They arranged their writings in internal logic in disregard of its formal connection. What the students did in writing is just to extend their LI schema instead of employing L2 thought patterns, which results in transfer errors. While English natives pay close attention to abstract thought and expect and require landmarks of coherence and unity as they read, which are often ignored by Chinese students. Thus Chinese students need to be sensitive to the expectations of English natives. So (1993) proposed that an awareness of English thought patterns be necessary.Teachers should introduce contrastive analysis of Chinese and English inclassroom and increase the students' awareness in Chinese-English thought patterns. And it's significant to compare different discourses and typical sentence patterns in these two languages and expand the practicing time to strengthen the probabilistic patterns between English...