A Study Of Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue On The English Writing Of Senior High School Students

In recent years, a very large number of domestic linguists, foreign linguists and teachers have done researches on negative transfer of mother tongue especially the negative transfer on English writing and they have got a lot of achievements, but most of their researches are qualitative not quantitative. Besides, most of their researches’ subjects are collegers, therefore, their achievements of researches cannot improve teaching English writing too much. There are still quite a few errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in the English writing of senior high school students. Thus, the author did a qualitative analysis and quantitative research on English writing of senior high school students in order to find out the reasons for negative transfer of mother tongue and come up with some strategies to decrease the errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue.In this research, the author mainly aims to deal with the following questions: ⑴ How many types of errors are caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in the English writing of senior high school students? ⑵ What is the specific proportion of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in the English writing of senior high school students?(3) What account for the errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue?Error analysis and interlanguage analysis are applied in this paper. In this research, the author analyzes students’ compositions with error analysis to find out the errors existing in the compositions and classify the errors. And then, by using interlanguage analysis, the author finds out the reasons that caused the errors and the strategies to decrease the students’ errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue.In this research, the author does questionnaires on students to get informed of the current situation of students’ English writing and their errors. Following this, the author collects 186 English compositions of Senior Three students from Dongming Number One Middle School and does statistic about the results of questionnaires and the errors to get the number of different kind of errors and does quantitative research on errors from the four aspects of morphology, vocabulary, syntax and discourse structure to get the specific proportion of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in the English writing. Finally, qualitative analysis is used to finds the reasons for errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue and to provide the strategies of decreasing the errors in English writing of senior high school students from the four aspects of morphology, vocabulary, syntax and discourse structure.After doing this research, the author gets the following conclusions. The first one is that there are twenty-one kinds of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in the English writing of senior high school students. The second one is that the proportion of errors in syntax is the largest. Studying syntax is most difficult for students. And the third one is that the main reasons for the errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue are that students’ basic knowledge is not solid enough and teachers do not pay enough attention to students’ phenomenon of negative transfer of mother tongue. Therefore, taking measures including treating errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue correctly, studying similarities and differences between English language and Chinese language and more attention to founding students’ basic knowledge is necessary.Due to the limitation of the author’s ability, the statistic about the kinds of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue and the strategies provided by the author are not comprehensive and the reasons for the errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue are not exact enough. Besides, the proposing of the strategies is mainly aimed at the students from Dongming Number One Middle School, therefore, the strategies are limited in some way. Thus, getting informed of more kinds of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue, the more exact reasons for the errors and finding out the more widely applicable strategies to decrease the errors are necessary in future research.