A Study On Chinese Negative Transfer In Students’ English Writing In Junior Middle School

English writing is very significant in English teaching and studying and it is also a hot point in the research area of English teaching. From 21 st century, English has become the world-wide language and people start to think highly of it. The English teaching reform is penetrated into the English class of junior middle school. The purpose of English writing is mainly to foster students’ ability of using English in communications. However, the junior middle school students are lied in the early phase of learning English and the students got used to the Chinese thinking habit. Moreover, students are lack of the English learning environment, so many errors of Chinese negative transfer will be found in students’ English writing. How to acknowledge the characteristics of English writing? How to find out the mistakes appeared in the students’ English writing? How to solve the problem that the students faced with? What kinds of teaching strategies can be adopted to reduce the Chinese negative transfer? All these kinds of questions are the concerned matters among the English teachers and researchers. In the learning process of English, it has become a very important topic that how to help students overcome the Chinese negative transfer in English writing. This research attempts to investigate the main types of errors made by junior middle school students in their English writing, then to explore the sources of the identified errors, and finally to find out some effective ways to overcome the mother tongue transfer in English learning.In order to figure out the answers to the three rsearch questions, an experiment is carried out and the subjects of this experiment are 100 students from two different classes in grade eight of No. 2 Middle School affiliated to QHNU. They have similar English learning background. Instruments used in this research are composition writing and questionnaire.The results of this study go as follows:(1) The author have found 13 main types of competence errors, and they are: 1) errors in noun; 2) errors in verb; 3) article errors; 4) errors in preposition; 5) errors in conjunction; 6) misspelling errors; 7) punctuation errors; 8) capitalization errors; 9) errors in over-generalization; 10) errors in subject-predicate agreement; 11) Chinglish expression; 12) run-on sentences;13) errors in tense. Among them, errors of noun adds up to 483 which took the highest position as a whole.(2) In addition,the author employs two different teaching methods in control class and experimental class. After conducting the research,the data from T-test shows that the usual method used in teaching writing makes little progress in control class. However, another data of T-test from the experimental class presents that there is significant difference between the pre-test and post-test. Therefore, it proves that the writing process approach used in experimental class in writing teaching makes so much progress that students’ writing ability improved much after the experiment.The dissertation consists of 6 chapters. The first part is a simple introduction about the negative transfer which introduced the related theories and researches at home and abroad. Later, the author classified the errors made by the students according to their English compositions of pre-test and post-test which are from the control and experiment classes, trying to figure out the factors caused by the mother tongue negative transfer. Lastly, the author put forward some effective strategies to reduce the Chinese negative transfer according to the errors occurred in the collected compositions. And the author hope these teaching strategies can help teachers and students to overcome the influence of Chinese negative transfer, improving students’ English writing ability.