A Survey Of Senior High School Students' English Writing Errors From The Perspective Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer

As for senior high school students,mastering the four basic skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing is crucial.However,Compared to the other three basic skills,mastering writing skill is relatively complicated.The complexity of writing is reflected in the frequent errors in students' composition texts.Especially,the errors caused by the negative transfer of mother tongue are very common in the compositions.Therefore,it is one of the teaching problems for all senior high school English teachers to help the students to overcome the composition errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in students' English writing.This investigation based on the phenomenon of mother tongue negative transfer,and carried out a study on senior high school students' English writing errors.The aim was to find the mother tongue negative transfer errors in students' compositions,then to explore the reasons for error,and summarize enlightenment of English writing teaching.These 95 students from Shiyan Middle School of Yan'an were investigated as the research object,and these students are from two classes of senior two.First,the writer asks every student to write an expository(October 10 th,2019),a narrative(October 17 th,2019)and an argument(October 24 th,2019).The writing topic of these three English essays are selected from the past college entrance examination questions,and students would finish the essay in 30 minutes(no less than 100 English words)Then the author made statistics,induction and analysis on the errors in the students' compositions,and finds that there are 1708 and 1568 errors respectively in class one and class two.The errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue are 1163 and 1041,which constitute about 68%and 66%.It can be clearly seen that the errors caused by the negative transfer of the mother tongue account for more than half of the total errors.This issue deserves the attention of the majority of English teachers.Later,the author divided three levels:vocabulary,syntax and text.Next the author divided the three types of errors into many specific items,such as articles,cases,singular and plural form,misuse of parts of speech,tense,consistent subject and predicate,parataxis structure,and Chinese mode of thinking etc,identify these types of errors,start a detailed analysis and correct them.After understanding the errors in the students' compositions,in order to explore the reasons for negative transfer of mother tongue in students' compositions,the author also adopts the questionnaire and interviews.Through SPSS 22.0 statistical software to collect and analyze the questionnaire date,and sort out the teachers' interview notes,the writer concluded that there are several reasons for the mother tongue negative transfer error:First,students conceive essays with mother tongue thinking;Second,students use writing methods that lead to mother tongue negative transfer errors;Third,the difference between English and Chinese;Fourth,students' accumulation of English sense is not enough;Fifth,students do not have enough knowledge of English sentence structure.Finally,according to the reasons for the mother tongue negative transfer errors,the writer combined with teachers' interview notes,and summarized the following implications for English writing teaching: First,help students conceive essays in English thinking;Second,help students improve their writing methods;Third,help students understand the differences between English and Chinese;Fourth,help students accumulate English language sense;Fifth,deepen students' understanding of English sentence structure.The writer hopes this research can be helpful and enlightening for Chinese students' English writing.