Negative Transfer Of Native Language In The Written Expression Of Chinese Students From Rural Middle Schools

Language transfer is a complex phenomenon affected by many factors, such as linguistic factors, social factors, individual differences and so on. Especially the students in rural middle schools are often influenced by the negative transfer of Chinese because they learn English in a Chinese environment. Also, most students are at the primary stage of their second language acquisition and their ability of using the language is limited because of the poor teaching and learning conditions of the school in a rural area. Therefore, this influence has become a main obstacle to the students' improvement of their English level, and especially to their composition writing. This thesis makes an analysis of the errors made by the students in their written expression from the perspective of language transfer and explores why a lot of negative language transfer of native language occurs in the written expression of the students in rural schools. The research focus is placed particularly on the non-linguistic factors affecting language transfer that has long been ignored. Meanwhile, this thesis also probes into the ways of reducing the errors in the students' written expression so as to improve the writing level of Chinese students in rural Middle Schools.The method used in the research was the combination of a questionnaire survey and an empirical study. The subjects were Senior High 1 students from Huinan Middle School. The questionnaire survey was conducted to gather some information about the teachers' teaching strategies and the students' learning beliefs and their attitudes towards English writing. The experiment involved two tests. In the pre-test, all the errors in the written expression of the students were collected and analyzed. In the post-test, the common errors in the written expression of the students from the experimental class and the controlled class were collected and analyzed respectively by means of SPSS 11.5. The results of the T-test were reported to explore if there exists a difference in the error frequency between the experimental class and the controlled class, and between the pre-test and the post-test of the experimental class. The findings of the study show that although there exist a large number of errors in the students' written expression and various causes for the errors as follows:1). The objective causes are the difference between the Chinese mode of thinking and the English mode of thinking and the difference in linguistic structures between English and Chinese while the subjective causes are the students' and the teachers' negative attitudes towards English writing and the errors committed by the students.2).The language learning environment in which the subjects are can also affect their acquisition of second language. However, after some effective teaching measures were taken, the errors in the students'written expression could be reduced and the writing level of the students in rural middle schools could be improved.