An Empirical Study Of Double Translation To Overcome Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Senior High School English Writing

English writing is an important language skill students should grasp. Compared with otherthree language skills, writing is the most difficult skill as it includes many factors, such asanalyzing the topic, combining words into sentences guided by grammatical rules, consideringparagraphs and the whole article, and so on. The complexity causes students to make mistakeslikely, and as a result students cannot get good scores. This problem catches manyresearchers’ and teachers’ attention. It is found that one of the main reasons for students’mistakes is the negative transfer of mother language. When students have difficulty in writing,they will turn to mother language for help. Many researchers theoretically focus on theinfluence of negative transfer of mother language and some ways to solve the problem, butthere are few empirical studies. Based on these theories: mother language transfer, contrastiveanalysis, error analysis, interlanguage and double translation, a new way is proposed to usedouble translation to overcome the influence of negative transfer of mother language. In orderto verify its suitability and effectiveness, the author makes a semester of experiment in twoselected classes(the experimental class and the controlled class) in Zhangzhou No.1SeniorHigh School in Fujian province. After the experiment, the collected data were sorted out andanalyzed. Then a conclusion has been drawn that using double translation is helpful toovercome the influence of negative transfer of mother language. Double translation enhancesstudents’ awareness of the difference between Chinese and English, and then students canconsciously avoid the impact of negative transfer during writing and write idiomatic Englishexpressions. On the other hand, their English writing skills have been improved to solve theproblems in students’ writing.