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

In the process of learning English, high school students are inevitably affected by mother tongue, which is called mother tongue transfer. English writing can reflect problems intuitively that high school students are affected by language transfer during language acquisition process. How to help students overcome the negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing, promote positive transfer to form the habit of thinking in English and increase English learning ability have become a necessity in English teaching. The previous literature focuses more on the impact of negative transfer in students' English writing and less on the reasons of mother tongue transfer as well as positive transfer. The author analyzed mother tongue transfer from many aspects and explained the causes of errors affected by negative transfer, as well as interpreted the ways of utilizing positive transfer to improve senior high school students' English learning ability.Based on the theories of mother tongue transfer, error analysis, contrastive analysis and inter-language, the author selected two classes from High School Attached to Shandong Normal University as research subjects. And it is proved that the senior high school students are affected deeply by mother tongue transfer in English writing through the methods of testing, corpus analysis and questionnaire.This thesis is divided into seven parts:The first part is the introduction and mainly elaborates the research background, the significance of the research and the structure of the article. The second part is literature review, including the previous studies about language transfer in English writing at home and abroad. The third part is the theoretical basis of this study as well as describing the concept of language transfer. The fourth part is the research design, which is divided into four sections: The first section introduces the research questions: 1.Whether errors in high students' English writing are connected with negative transfer of mother tongue. 2.The reasons which cause high school students making errors in English writing. 3. The aspects which positive transfer of mother tongue can help high school students in English writing. The second section introduces the objects of study. The third section is research methods. The fourth section is research progress, aiming at ensuring the truth and scientificality of the research. The fifth part is the results and analysis. According to the analysis of English compositions and questionnaires, the author not only explains the phenomena and reasons which high school students are affected by negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing, but also interprets how to use their mother tongue to promote English writing. The sixth part puts forward some specific suggestions for English teaching, so that teachers can have a proper understanding of language transfer and improve English teaching level. The seventh part is conclusion, which summarizes the full text and points out the limitations of this study and puts forward ideas for further research.The conclusions of the study are as follows. First, according to the data analysis of questionnaires, it shows that high school students are highly affected by their native language. The most influential aspect in high school students' writing is native language thinking. The targets use Chinese thinking to design their compositions. Besides, high school students have certain English grammar monitoring consciousness and can consciously monitor their language output. But for those grammar rules don't exist(such as the subjunctive, etc.) in Chinese, most of the students use avoidance strategies. And high school students still need to develop their English thinking ability. Finally, high school students' English writing level and native language writing level are connected closely, which provides a foundation for the application of positive language transfer in English writing.Second, from the results of corpus analysis, it shows that high school students are affected by their native language in two aspects in English writing. For one thing, the influences of positive transfer of mother tongue are as follows. Firstly, the similarities between English and Chinese sentence patterns are beneficial to students' mastery of English sentence patterns. Secondly, English words which are completely correspondent with Chinese words can reduce the difficulty of selecting words for high school students in English writing. Thirdly, in English, many sentence patterns are in the same order as Chinese, which can promote students' English language output. For another, the subjects are also influenced by negative transfer of mother tongue. The errors including vocabulary, syntax and language expression in their English writing are closely connected with negative transfer. In vocabulary, many students choose English words only according to their Chinese meanings without considering context. And the number of meaning misuse errors is the largest. From the perspective of English syntactic analysis, high school students make syntactic errors because they are easy to ignore the differences between English and Chinese in syntactic rules. The errors of language expression can be found in most students' compositions. There are no obvious grammatical errors in these sentences. But they are not idiomatic expression, such as too verbose or translated into English according to Chinese directly regardless of whether the expression is idiomatic. That's because students don't have enough input of target language and are highly affected by Chinese thinking and expression.Third, mother tongue can be conductive to English writing as follows. Firstly, thinking in L1 can help students construct the structure of English composition more efficiently. Secondly, the similarities between Chinese and English in grammar are good for students' English learning. For example, the syntactic structures of simple sentences in English and Chinese are similar, which can help students master English sentence patterns. Thirdly, students can quickly extract words whose meanings are completely correspondent with Chinese words and reduce the probability of making errors. Fourthly, the improvement of learners' mother tongue writing proficiency can improve their English writing proficiency.Due to the limitations of the researcher's ability, the breadth and depth of this investigation need to be improved.