A Study On Language Transfer In English Writing Of The Tibetan-chinese English Major Students

As a focus of applied linguistics, second language acquisition and English teaching, language transfer has been studied for about one century. Researchers at home and abroad study it further and profoundly through the researches of second language and multilanguage acquisition, which enhance the development of language learning and teaching greatly. In the light of the poor achievements in English of Tibetan students in China, the author tries to find out the errors involving grammar in the English writing papers of Tibetan-Chinese English major students and the reasons that cause those errors to occur.In this paper, the author firstly collects the language learning background of Tibetan students and their opinions about English grammar learning, and then generalizes the top ten grammatical problems by the analysis of Tibetan-Chinese English major students'writing papers. These problems are relatively centralized on word collocation, subject and predicate concord, singular and plural nouns etc. According to language transfer theories, by error analysis of those writing papers, meanwhile through comparisons among Tibetan, Chinese and English to analyze how these errors produce, this paper is expected to improve the English learning of Tibetan students and the teaching level in Tibetan area. The author also hopes that this study can be helpful to English education in other ethnic areas of China.There are five chapters in this paper. The first one, the introduction, is to introduce the research background, purpose and significance as well as the research questions of this paper. The second chapter is the literature review which minutely introduces the history and development, the contents and significant achievements of language transfer and multilanguage transfer, studies and researches of language transfer influencing on English writing, and further study of language transfer. The third part focuses on the analysis of the questionnaire and the generalization of the main errors occurring in the English writing papers of Tibetan-Chinese English major students. The fourth part concentrates on analyzing the questionnaire and the reasons of those grammatical problems generalized in last chapter. And the last part is the conclusion of this study.