An Analysis Of Chinese Negative Transfer Errors In Junior High School Students’ English Writing

With the incessant development of junior high school English writing teaching practice,teachers are paying increasingly more attention to the types of errors or mistakes and their proportions in junior high school students’ English writing.So far,however,they have not sufficiently understood the categories and proportions of errors caused by negative transfer from Chinese,their mother tongue or first language.At the same time,with the growth of junior high school English writing teaching research,scholars are conducting increasingly more studies of the different types of errors and their proportions in junior high school students’ English writing.Up to now,however,they have not adequately explored the categories and proportions of Chinese negative transfer errors.In such a practical and academic setting,therefore,the present study attempts to conduct a study of the errors in junior high school students’ English writing caused by Chinese transfer in terms of their types and proportions within all kinds of errors,and in terms of their psychological manifestations.To be specific,this study intends to address the following questions:(1)What is the proportion of errors caused by Chinese transfer among all types of errors in junior high school English writing?(2)What are the main categories,and proportions of these categories,of Chinese transfer errors in junior high school English writing?(3)What are the psychological manifestations of Chinese negative transfer errors in junior high school English writing? In order to answer the above questions,this study is carried out in the light of language transfer theories and the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis,through the methods of testing,error analysis,questionnaire survey and interview,and with the students and teachers of six grade 8classes from a junior high school in Laixi as participants.Results generated from the study demonstrate the following:(1)Among all types of intralingual and interlingual errors in junior high school students’ English writing,the interlingual errors caused by Chinese negative transfer account for two thirds,indicating that junior high school students are greatly influenced by their mother tongue in English writing.(2)The Chinese negative transfer errors in junior high school students’ English writing mainly include the following categories in the order from larger to smaller proportions: syntactic errors,morphological errors,vocabulary collocation errors and discourse errors.(3)The psychological manifestations of Chinese negative transfer errors in junior high school students’ English writing mainly include the following categories in the order from larger to smaller proportions: morphological interferences,syntactic interferences,vocabulary semantic interferences and discourse interferences.This study may be practically and academically significant.Practically,its findings may help teachers to better understand the phenomenon of Chinese negative transfer in junior high school students’ English writing and adopt such transfer control strategies as knowing about English-Chinese differences,increasing English input,guarding against negative transfer,and enriching English writing teaching methods.Academically,this study may promote scholars’ study of Chinese negative transfer in junior high school students’ English writing in terms of their categories,proportions,and psychological manifestations.