The Influences Of Negative Transfer From Chinese On Higher Vocational College Students' English Reading Comprehension

Reading is an important way for higher vocational college students to learn English well.They read English in order to effectively obtain information for study and communication with others.However,influenced by Chinese thinking and habits,higher vocational college students often have difficulties in English reading comprehension,where there are influences of negative transfer from Chinese.It is difficult for the students to remember English words,to understand English sentences and to develop their reading efficiency.This will cause them to lose confidence in learning English.Language transfer is an important issue in second language acquisition.According to the contrastive analysis hypothesis,positive transfer will promote the second language acquisition,and negative transfer will interfere with or hold back the second language acquisition.Research done in China focuses less on the relationships between transfer and English reading.This thesis is based on language transfer theory.It analyzes the influences of negative transfer from Chinese on higher vocational college students' English reading comprehension at the level of vocabulary and syntax in terms of contrastive analysis.The research adopts a questionnaire,a reading test and an individual interview to do an experiment on 86 college freshmen of non-English majors in Tieling Normal College.The reading tests derive from the reading comprehension of the Practical English Test for Colleges(PRETCO).The collected data were used for analysis,which answers the following three questions.1.What are the features of negative transfer from Chinese in higher vocational college students' English reading comprehension?2.Why is there negative transfer from Chinese in the English reading comprehension?3.How does negative transfer from Chinese influence the students' English reading comprehension?It is shown in the research that the influences of Chinese negative transfer mainly take place at the vocabulary level and the syntactic level.Higher vocational college students are so weak at English reading comprehension that they have poor recall of English words and grammar,which makes them misunderstand what they read or fail to guess the new word's meaning.In addition,it is found in this research that reading speed is affected by negative transfer in the discourse level.Phonetic transfer indirectly has an effect on students'memorizing vocabulary.At last,spelling mistakes also lower the students' scores in the test.This paper includes five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction about the background,significance and structure of the thesis.The second chapter is literature review,which describes language transfer and its relative theory.It also describes PRETCO-A and discusses the relationship between output hypothesis and College English reading.In addition,it talks about the role of transfer in the English reading comprehension.The third chapter discusses the research methodology,including research questions,subjects,instruments and the research procedure.The fourth chapter discusses the systematic and scientific data analysis on the research results.The last chapter is the conclusion.It summarizes the whole text and makes suggestions for future teaching.