Inquiry Into Negative Transfer Effects Of First Language And Strategies In College English Writing

Among the four important language skills in English learning,writing is regarded as the most complex one for Chinese college students.There are often some errors in college students’ English writing.One noticeable factor that exists in Chinese students’ English writing is the negative transfer of the mother tongue.This research employs the quantitative and qualitative methods.And two approaches are adopted in the research: English writing analysis and interview.Based on the theories of Contrastive Analysis,Error Analysis and Interlanguage Research,the author made an emprical study on transfer errors to investigate the influence of native language transfer on Chinese students’ English writing.The subjects for the study are 8 English major college students in Harbin Normal University.The language errors are collected from their writings.The collections are classified into three broad categories.The quantitative results show that the grammatical errors stand out.Chinglish is on the top rank among the errors in tense and voice of verbs are the most common grammatical errors.Questionnaire was done after the writing analysis.Interviews Results from the interview further confirm that Chinese students’ writing errors are affected by Chinese interference.There are some reasons: Chinese EFL(English as a foreign language)students’ reliance on their mother tongue is greatly determined by the degree of markedness of certain linguistic structures;Learners’ way of acquiring English vocabulay,their knowledge about cross-linguistic differences between English and Chinese their writing strategies are also found to play a part in their reliance on their mother tongue in EFL compositions.So the author based on this study,putting forward some suggestions in order to decrease the impact of mother tongue negative transfer and further enhance learners’ English learning ability and level.