English Writing Error Analysis Of Non-English Post-graduates From Perspective Of Negative Transfer

Among the four skills of Chinese students in learning English, writing is considered tobe the most difficult one. Different from writing in their mother tongue, English writingrequires certain language capability as well as the ability to apply writing strategies and skills.The complexity of English writing always gets the students into trouble and errors. One mainelement leading to these errors is the negative transfer of the mother tongue.Non-English major postgraduates are better at English and can get more instruction thanthe students of other levels; therefore，their English capability is greater and suffer relativelyless interference from their mother tongue, but they still make mistakes in substance, lexis,syntax and discourse. After analyzing the compositions of106non-English majorpostgraduates, the author found that744errors arise from the negative transfer of their mothertongue, including79errors in morphology,214errors in lexis,388errors in syntax and63errors in discourse, taking up7.45%,20.25%,36.6%and5.9%of the total errors respectively.After analyzing these errors, the paper summarizes the causes for the occurrence of thenegative transfer of the mother tongue in their English writing:1. the absence ofcross-cultural awareness;2. little knowledge of linguistic differences between Chinese andEnglish;3. insufficient understanding of the influence of negative transfer of mother tongue.English writing of Chinese students is likely to be influenced by the negative transfer of theirmother tongue; therefore, the negative transfer is a barrier which cannot be ignored whenChinese students are trying to enhance their English writing quality. In order to enhancestudents’ English writing quality, appropriate measures should be taken to reduce or eliminatethe influence from the negative transfer of the mother tongue on students’ English writing asmuch as possible. For this purpose, the author puts forward four countermeasures for theteaching of English writing:1. creating an English environment beneficial for learning;2.increasing their vocabulary input and application;3. cultivating their language intuitionthrough English reading;4. strengthening cultural import in teaching process. So teachers canadopt different teaching strategies in their teaching process so that their teaching can betarget-oriented and students will find out their weakness in their learning process and willadopt actively certain measures to overcome the negative transfer of the mother tongue. The joint efforts between teachers and students will definitely enhance the students’ Englishwriting ability.