A Study On The Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue On Verbs In English Writing And Its Solutions

Language transfer is one of the common phenomena in the process of second language learning.In general,language transfer can be classified into two types:positive transfer and negative transfer.Positive transfer is transfer that has a promoting function to target language learning.While negative transfer means the interference of previous knowledge in the process of learning something new.Writing,as one of the skills,can reflect students’ comprehensive knowledge.It is also a reflection of students’ performance of language communication.Verbs are the main part of speech used in students’ writings,while the students are often confused about verbs and they often make errors in writings.And it has become the main obstacle for them to improve their English writing.This paper is based on the theory of language transfer,error analysis.And it aims to study the main verbal errors that caused by negative transfer of mother tongue from the aspect of error analysis.This research is about the negative transfer of mother tongue on the verbs in students’ writings.The participants are 78 students,who are from Ningxia Agricultural School.The whole research lasts for one term and this paper aims to answer three questions:(1)What are the main verbal errors in students’ writing?(2)What are the verbal errors that caused by NT of mother tongue?(3)What are the pedagogical solutions to reduce the influence of negative transfer?Three kinds of instruments are employed to answer the research questions:writing assignments,questionnaire and interview.In the whole process,the participants are required to finish seven writing assignments according to the different topics on their books.Each time the author collects all the verbal errors.Then,the author classifies these errors and find out the main verbal errors.The results show that verbals errors have a great influence on students’writing.And there are mainly 592 verbal errors in students writings and they can be divided into seven types:subject-predicate disagreement errors,redundancy errors,tense errors,voice errors,verb collocation errors,misspelling errors and errors after the modal and auxiliary verbs.And errors caused by the negative transfer are 440,which takes up 74%and can be classified into four kinds:subject-predicate disagreement errors,tense errors,voice errors,verb collocation errors.The author chooses some typical sentences to analyze these errors,besides with the help of questionnaire and interview,the author proposes some suggestive strategies to reduce the negative transfer of mother tongue and improve the students’ writing performance.This paper consists of five parts.In chapter one,the research background,significance and a brief structure are illustrated.Chapter two is about some theoretical basis and related studies.In chapter three,the research design is explained in detail,which includes the research subjects,instruments,procedure and how the data is collected.Chapter four is a detailed introduction of data analysis and discussion.Chapter five shows the findings of the present paper,besides the author points out some limitations of this study and then puts forward some suitable suggestions for further studies.