An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue On English Writing Errors In Junior Middle School

As an indispensable part of English learning,writing plays a crucial role in English learning.It can not only promote the development of students’ critical thinking,but also help students improve their ability of using target language.Based on the theory of error analysis and interlanguage,this thesis adopts the research methods of text analysis,questionnaire and interview,aiming to answer the following two questions: 1)what types of errors are caused by the negative transfer of mother tongue in junior high school students’ English compositions? 2)What are the causes of these errors?By the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,the study focuses on the negative transfer of mother tongue on English Writing Errors in Junior Middle School.First of all,the author analyzes in details the writing samples of 165 junior high school students who are grade 9 students at present from the aspects of vocabulary,syntax and discourse and then do a questionnaire to the same students.Moreover,an interview to the four English teachers teaching grade 9 and with rich teaching experience is conducted to find out the causes of the writing errors,although parts of them can be seen through the analysis of texts and the survey to the students.Based on the data collected,the author draws the following major findings :(1)the negative transfer of mother tongue does exist in students’ English writing and it does have an impact on students’ English writing errors.(2)Errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue can be manifested in the forms of vocabulary,syntax and discourse.The errors in vocabulary items are errors in collocation,errors in part of speech,errors in word meaning and spelling errors.The errors in syntactic items are errors in sentence structure,errors in S-V inconsistency,errors in tense confusion and errors in personal confusion.The errors in discourse items mainly refer to the lack of link words and run on sentences.(3)As for the reasons of these errors,they are the differences in thinking styles and language structures between Chinese and English,the insufficient English learning environment for students,and the inappropriate teaching strategies of teachers.