A Study Of Negative Transfer Of Native Language On Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Along with the Olympic Games in Beijing and World Expo in Shanghai being convened successfully, the international exchange have been becoming increasingly frequent, which prominents the importance of English, the world language universally acknowledged. More and more attention has been paid to students’competence in applying language in communication. Ding Wangdao(1999), an English professor, once suggested that writing, whose position is extremely important, plays an irreplaceable role in English learning. New Curriculum Standard has also presented higher demands for writing competence of senior high school students. Nevertheless, among the four basic skills in English learning, writing is considered as the most complicated one with the least effects. The complicacy of English has been confusing students in making errors. What’s more, NL negative transfer can be acknowledged as one of the key factors among them.Transfer refers to the interference from learners’ acquired knowledge or skills on new knowledge and skills. During 1950s, Robert Lado, an American linguist, once proposed the theories of language transfer on foreign language acquisition and learning. Lado suggested that language learners depended upon their native language heavily. In addition, the language forms, meaning and culture related to NL are transferred into second language acquisition by most learners. Language transfer is generally classified into two types:positive transfer and negative transfer. Negative transfer will take place by students’ rote of NL rules when some features o f the target language differ greatly from those of NL.Quantitative and qualitative analysis are employed to analyze NL negative transfer occurring in senior high school students’ English learning.120 students, selected randomly from the three different senior high schools at the same level, are the subjects of this study, who will be asked to fill in questionnaires with their own unique numbers, from 1 to 120. The compositions of the first diagnostic test in Leshan written by them will be collected and the corresponding numbers will be signed on the papers. The author analyzes the errors taking place in these compositions from three dimensions:lexis, sentence and discourse. Pearson correlation analysis will be adopted to discuss the relationship between questionnaire marks and composition scores.The following five questions need to be solved by means of this study.(1) What is the percentage of each error in students’ writing?(2) Which kinds of errors on NL negative transfer occur in students’writing frequently?(3) What is the relationship between the writing scores and the degree of NL negative transfer?(4) What are the main reasons causing NL negative transfer in senior high school students’ writing?(5) What measures can be taken to avoid NL negative transfer in writing?It can be concluded according to the data and compositions that the errors on lexis account for 33%, on sentence for 57% and on discourse for 10%. Analyzed from the results of Chapter Five, the main reasons causing negative transfer lie in transferring language form, meaning and relative culture of NL into English writing. At the end of this thesis, three pieces of advice on teaching implication are put forward:(1) Increasing the proportion of the contrast between English and Chinese; (2) Encouraging extensive reading and true writing environment; (3) Introducing cultural elements in teaching.This thesis is composed of six chapters.The first chapter is the introduction where study background, study purposes, the significance and the layout of study are involved. The second chapter is literature review which introduces some theories being relative to this thesis. In Chapter Three, questionnaires and composition analysis are adopted to solve the five questions posed above. The data analyzed in Chapter Four are used to answer the first three questions. In Chapter Five, the author analyzes the students sample compositions and summarizes the five questions. Chapter Six is the conclusion of the above five chapters.