An Investigative Research On Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In Junior High School Students’ English Writing

Based on the requirements of core competence teaching objectives,for junior high school students,it is vitally necessary and important to master the four basic skills of English listening,speaking,reading and writing.By contrast with the other three skills,mastering writing skill is much more difficult.A vast number of errors are in students’ English compositions,and there is a large proportion of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue.It is well known that the junior high school students who have the limited English proficiency are inevitably affected by the negative transfer of their mother tongue in English writing.Therefore,all English teachers have to understand negative transfer of Chinese positively and correctly,find out the proper teaching method to help students reduce the negative transfer errors and improve the quality and level of students’ English writing.This thesis investigates the phenomenon of mother tongue negative transfer in junior high school students’ English writing,explores the causes of negative transfer errors and tries to put forward some effective suggestions based on the research results.The questions of this thesis are as follows.Question 1: What aspects does the negative transfer of mother tongue affect in junior high school students’ English writing? What kind of aspects is the most prominent?Question 2: What are the causes for negative transfer of mother tongue in students’ English writing?This research takes 250 third-year students and 11 English teachers who are from Jinzhou No.18 Middle School as participants.First of all,243 valid students’ English compositions are made error analysis to explore the types of errors caused by negative transfer of mother tongue in students’ English compositions.And then questionnaire and interview are used to explore the causes for the negative transfer of mother tongue in junior high school students’ English writing.After analyzing students’ English compositions,the 1904 negative transfer errors are classified into four types.They are lexis,syntax,discourse and pragmatics respectively.And the research result shows that junior high school students commit most of the syntax errors caused by the negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing.After sorting out the questionnaire and interview results,it can be found that poor knowledge of English,inadequate mastery of the linguistic difference,inappropriate English learning and writing methods,little input of English leading to poor sense,ignoring contrastive analysis teaching and learning are the main causes for negative transfer of mother tongue.In addition,this thesis also puts forward some practical pedagogical suggestions based on the survey results,and it is hoped that this research can be helpful to Chinese students’ English writing and teachers’ English writing teaching.