Research On Negative Transfer In Chinese High School Students' Writing In English

Writing is a very important component in English language teaching and learning. The ability to write in English has commonly been taken as one of the acceptable evidence of proficiency, therefore, writing plays an important role in English teaching. Nevertheless, the performance of writing is far from satisfactory. We can easily find that there are a growing number of errors in students'composition. As a high school student in China, there is no doubt that he or she really wants to write English sentences much more fluently and reasonably, but there are always some errors which are inevitable in their compositions. Meanwhile, they can not clearly express their own ideas and opinions in English.Teaching writing in high school is not an easy task owing to its speciality and complexity. In addition, it lacks formal and systematic classroom training, therefore, writing teaching poses a huge problem to English teachers in high schools, naturally, the students also have a large quantity of difficulties in developing their writing competence. In the course of more than ten years'teaching practice and experience, the author collected a variety of examples of negative transfer in the students'English writing. In order to make the writing practice much more effective and efficient, and on the basis of the previous achievements in this field, the author carries out a study on some common English errors which are all collected from high school students'compositions. The errors which the students made in their writing compositions are carefully identified and those that were resulted from their mother tongue's negative transfer are particularly discussed and analyzed in detail. And by analyzing these common errors, the author finds that the native language's negative transfer is frequently one of the major causes of these errors. According to language transfer theories, these errors are manifested in diction, sentence structure, discourse, culture, writing habit, and so on.According to these findings, it is natural that we can draw some pedagogical implications in English writing learning practice and writing teaching. Such a study is also advantageous to the improvement of English teaching approaches. The primary purpose of this thesis is to enrich the research of mother tongue's negative transfer and it may also be helpful for both Chinese learners and English teachers. The students in high school can not only increase their competence of writing but also improve their writing language proficiency. In the meantime, The English teachers can greatly decrease the number of the students'writing errors in the compositions and make some proper and appropriate adjustments in their teaching process. This thesis is made up of three parts. The first part is the brief introduction. The second part is the main body of the thesis, which consists of four chapters. Chapter One deals with students'English writing problems in the High School. It consists of definition of the writing, the process of the writing and the problems in the high school students writing. Chapter Two presents literature review on language transfer, it is the theoretical basis for the whole thesis. It begins with a definition of some central terms, such as positive transfer and negative transfer, including some theory about writing and the relationship between EFL learners writing and their L1 interference. Chapter Three makes a detailed discussion on negative transfer in English writing. It is the core of the thesis. The author analyze the native transfer in high school students'English writing in terms of lexis, syntax, discourse and culture so as to find out the factors that contribute to negative transfer. Chapter Four is the implications for English writing teaching in high school, firstly the author explains how to raise awareness of the difference between the two languages and how to make good use of native transfer in English learning and writing, including the instruction on some Transfer Strategy efficiently. The last part is the conclusion of this thesis...