A Study Of Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue In English Writing Of Junior High School

As the major international language in today’ s world,English is of great importance.English writing is not only one of the important skills that learners need to master in learning,but also the focus of teaching.For junior high school students,cultivating good writing ability plays an important role in improving their English ability.However,with studying English in a lack of language communication environment for a long time,students inevitably encounter an obvious problem in the process of English writing,that is mother tongue transfer.Studying the problems of mother tongue transfer has a practical significance for improving the English writing level of junior high school students.This research took contrastive analysis and error analysis as its theoretical basis.The main research questions are as follows:(1)What are the specific manifestations of negative transfer of mother tongue in students’ English writing of junior middle school?(2)What are the main reasons that cause negative transfer of mother tongue? The author chose students from three classes of Grade 8 selected from Gangcheng School attached to Zhanjiang No.2 Middle School as research subjects.Through the statistics and analysis of 152 students’ writing samples in different periods,the author found that students had a large number of errors at the lexical level,syntactic level and discourse level,which caused by negative transfer of mother tongue.Lexical errors are specifically reflected in misinterpretation of words,misuse of parts of speech,vacant words,redundant words,word confusion,improper collocation and improper word order.Syntactic errors are mainly reflected in lack of subject,lack of predicate,subject-verb disagreement,misuse of negative sentence,voice error,incomplete sentence structure,Chinglish and tense error.Discourse errors are concentrated in run-on sentence and discourse Pattern.Through interviews with students and English teachers,it is further found that the phenomenon of negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing is related to student s’ factor and teachers’ factor.The external factors of students are mother tongue interference and weak language foundation.The internal factor is insufficient language input,which is manifested in single source of language input,low quality of language input and weak motivation of language learning.Teachers’ factor is mainly manifested in neglecting the teaching of English cultural background knowledge,ignoring the creation of classroom English language environment and insufficient recognition of negative transfer of mother tongue.In response to these problems,corresponding teaching strategies are proposed to improve negative transfer of mother tongue,such as creating a language environment,using contrastive analysis strategy,formulating error correction and focusing on the training of English basic knowledge.