A Study Of Transfer Barriers Of Chinese-English Thinking And Teaching Strategies In Senior Middle School English Writing

Language is the main reflection of thinking and thinking restricts and shapes language as well. It is found in students’English compositions that after some years of English learning many of the English sentences they have written are still Chinglish even with some knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, which shows that there exist many barriers during the transfer of Chinese-English thinking. At word level the barriers include confusion of part of speech, semantic misuse and improper collocation. At sentence level the barriers are voice misuse, negation misuse, monotonous sentence patterns and confusion of word order; and at discourse level the barriers are no focus of theme and a lack of cohesion and coherence. The barriers mainly result from different mode of thinking in Chinese and English and negative transfer of Chinese.In view of this, the author has tried to carry out a teaching experiment directed by the theory concerning the differences between Chinese and Western thinking mode and mental model theory. The subjects are100students in two classes, Grade2in the second high school in Liling, Hunan province. The experiment has lasted a semester with four periods. In the first period the experimental objects and a pretest are decided to verify if the English writing level of the experimental class and the control class is consistent and if the teaching experiment can be done. The second period is the implementation of the experiment. In the experimental class, the author adopted the teaching strategies by activating and creating students’mental models. The differences between Chinese and English thinking mode are compared and analyzed and the trainings of English thinking are done from the level of word, sentence and discourse in order to help students construct stable and correct English mental model, remove some of the barriers in their English writing, thus improve students’ English expression ability effectively. In the control class, the teaching of English writing is still done in a traditional mode of writing classroom teaching. In the third period a post test is made in the two classes. The compositions are marked according to the same steps and standard of the pretest, and then the result statistics are obtained. The fourth period is for the comparative analysis of the composition scores of the pretest and post test. According to the data analysis we can verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the teaching strategies in the experiment.It is concluded from the experiment that the teaching strategies in the experiment concerning the training of English thinking transfer based on the differences in the Chinese-English thinking mode are feasible and effective and the students’English thinking ability can be improved.