A Contrastive Approach To Negative Transfer And Its Pedagogical Implications In Intensive Reading

For many years English teachers have struggled with the problem of "high investment with low return". This thesis is a tentative endeavor to make up for the common deficiency in neglecting the learner's intake of the TL (target language) in those widely adopted methods in intensive reading, with a focus on its outward manifestation—negative transfer of his NL (native language), which accounts for a multitude of errors in his written texts in English. Thus, a contrastive approach might be feasible to reduce the amount of those errors stemming from the negative transfer of his NL.To start with, the thesis makes a detailed analysis of the two approaches within a grammar-translation framework and within a communicative framework. The traditional intensive reading within a grammar-translation framework has been challenged with the fact that many college students are poor at using the language. Nowadays, teaching intensive reading within a communicative framework is widely adopted. This approach is not without problems, among which the learner's poor accuracy and low proficiency are the outward manifestation of its weaknesses. As far as the methods are concerned, within either a grammar-translation framework or a communicative framework, there is an obvious deficiency in common, i.e., intake as a very important learning process has been neglected. Therefore, the author proposes that the contrastive approach, which has long been in existence but fallen into disfavor pedagogically in recent years, be adopted in intensive reading course. A widespread misconception that the essence of the contrastive approach is similar to that of grammar-translation approach is likely to account for its falling into disfavor pedagogically. But the truth is that grammars explicate TL points while the contrastive approach explains the dissimilarities of the NL version and the TL version and notices the discrepancy or the incongruence between these two, which is helpful in facilitating learners to turn more input of English into intake throughthe process of increased awareness. Consequently, the contrastive approach is thought to be beneficial to learners in that negative transfer errors might be preventable and eliminated.As for the negative transfer errors, there is widespread disagreement among researchers as to exactly what proportion of errors can be put down to transfer, so the author conducted a research, whose subjects are non-English major freshmen at Jiang Han University, to reveal to what extent negative transfer of the native knowledge is in the Chinese-speaking learners of English. The data of this research are fully analyzed at lexis, syntax and discourse levels in terms of L1 interference and avoidance. Hence, a conclusion is drawn that most errors (about 70%) were the results of negative transfer of NL, which contradicts the ones made by some western linguists. Meanwhile, to confirm that the magnitude of negative transfer errors has something to do with the teaching approaches to a certain extent, the author chose to administer a questionnaire so as to know about the English teaching approaches in their high schools. The results are within the author's expectation.What follows the research is about the dissimilarities of the two languages categorized at the same levels: lexis, syntax and discourse, mainly in response to those negative transfer errors collected, analyzed and thus categorized in the data analysis of the research in the preceding part. What's more, the author makes an attempt to find out the causes for these dissimilarities in terms of language, culture and thinking pattern and the methods to make learners' English more accurate and idiomatic.Next the thesis makes a full analysis of how to put the contrastive approach into intensive reading still from three categories: lexis, syntax and discourse since the paper is an attempt to suggest a text teaching by adopting the contrastive approach. A multitude of language phenomena can be singled out as contrastive objects in a text, but what the author is concerned with are only those that the Chinese student will most likely ignore and fail to turn into productive knowledge. The choice of teaching material is mainly on the basis of the contrastive items...