Syntactic Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Senior High School Students' English Writings

English writing is one of the most important contents in English teaching.Nowadays,a lot of errors in senior high school students writings are what we call Chinglish,because students are used to translating Chinese expressions into English directly and neglect the differences between Chinese and English,which is the result of the negative transfer of mother tongue.The negative transfer of mother tongue can happen at the levels of vocabulary,syntax and discourse.Among them,the syntactic negative transfer is the most serious one.So,this research is intended to explore the negative transfer of mother tongue at syntactic level in senior high school students',English writings and come up with suggestions,aiming to provide guidance for the teaching of English writing.This study takes 100 students of grade one in Gutian No.l Senior High School as the research subjects and those students' writings as corpus.Combining literature research with empirical research,based on comparative analysis theory and error analysis theory,this thesis tries to explore the types and causes of the syntactic negative transfer of mother tongue in senior high school students' English writings.This study finds that:(1)The main types of the syntactic negative transfer of mother tongue in senior high school students',English writings include:the errors of run-on sentences;the errors of predicates(tense and voice);the errors of "There be" structure;the errors of verb transitivity and the errors of subordinate clauses.(2)Senior high school students' heavy reliance on their mother tongue when they write in English is one of the main causes of the syntactic negative transfer of mother tongue.(3)There are outstanding differences between high level writing group and low level writing group.(4)There is negative correlation between students' syntactic error frequency and their English grade.(5)There is negative correlation between students' syntactic error frequency and their Chinese grade.Based on above findings,this thesis gives the following suggestions on the teaching of English writing in senior high schools:(1)Take the contrastive analysis between Chinese sentence structures and English sentence structures to strengthen syntactic training.(2)Adopt the error analysis method and do direct error correction exercises.(3)Enlarge students',English input and develop their English thinking awareness to reduce students,dependence on their mother tongue.(4)Change the pattern of correcting students' writings.It is hoped that this study can provide guidance for future teaching of English writing in senior high schools and reduce the negative transfer of mother tongue at syntactic levels as much as possible to improve the students' English writing ability.