An Empirical Study On The Negative Transfer Of Mother Tongue At The Textual Level In Senior High School Students English Writing

Writing teaching is really such an important composition of English teaching in senior high school.Writing level has a direct impact on students’ scores in the exam,and also their ability to use English appropriately in daily communication.Hence,the significance of English writing in high school is obviously self-evident.Nonetheless,the current situation of English writing in high school is actually not satisfactory.Students’ compositions often have negative transfer of mother tongue.It can be seen that the existence of mother tongue transfer in English language writing is an indisputable fact,and the interference of mother tongue on English writing is also undeniable.This paper aims to talk over the current situation of the negative transfer of mother tongue in senior high school students’ English writing from discourse level,analyze the reasons of the issues,and come up with the corresponding teaching suggestions for English writing in senior high school.Therefore,based on the native language transfer theory and the theory of discourse analysis,this paper selected 300 native Chinese students from arts classes and science classes of Grade 2 in Shihezi X high school,as the object of study.The research approaches of quantitative and qualitative analysis were adopted to answer the following three questions by the specific mothods of corpus analysis,questionnaire survey and teacher interview: 1.What are the main types and distributions of negative transfer of mother tongue from textual level in English writing at senior high school? It was carried out from two aspects: discourse cohesion and text layout.2.What are the primary reasons for the negative transfer of mother tongue in English writing? 3.What kind of teaching strategy should be taken to avoid the negative transfer of mother tongue?Based on the corpus analysis of students’ essays collected in two monthly examinations,and the further exploration of the results of students’ questionnaire survey and teachers’ interview,conclusions can be drawn as follows: 1.Firstly,in terms of textual cohesion,the negative transfer of mother tongue in the use of anaphora was mainly reflected in the misuse of anaphora,absence of anaphora,anaphora confusion,definite article errors,etc.The methods of omission and substitution were mainly reflected in the students’ copying of the rules and idioms of omission and substitution in Chinese into English texts.Conjunctions were mainly embodied in the overuse of connectives,misuse of connectives and zero connectives.Lexical cohesion was mainly embodied in the use of prepositions and fixed collocation errors.The most serious errors were the use of connection and collocations.All of the above errors are mainly due to students’ failure to understand and grasp the features and differences of cohesive devices used in English and Chinese texts.As a native language,Chinese is an important distraction for Chinese students to learn and use English.There is a significant negative transfer effect in students’ English writing.Secondly,in terms of the layout of the article,the beginning of the article was too lengthy,which did not conform to the linear development characteristics of English articles.In the development part of the article,the content was still too much redundant,not clear,the overall lack of logic.In addition,the beginnin of the paragraph lacks or even had no topic sentence,and the structure was confused.At the end of the article,the main part of the discussion came to an abrupt end.It would lead to the result that the ending was missing and the structure was incomplete.In conclusion,although students had the awareness of using five cohesive devices,they used few and single devices,resulting in a high error rate.Students deliberately paid attention to paragraph organization in the composition,which resulted in a rigid three-paragraph pattern,and the content was still not logical.2.Combined with students’ questionnaire survey and teacher interview,this paper further excavated the present situation and reasons of negative transfer of mother tongue at the level of students’ English writing,and concluded that the main reasons for the above mistakes in mother tongue transfer included cultural and thinking differences between English and Chinese,serious lack of English input for middle school students,problems in English teaching and so on.3.In view of these errors and their causes,teaching countermeasures can be taken,such as comparative analysis of English and Chinese differences,increasing language input,strengthening daily writing training and accumulation,creating English language environment,paying attention to students’ writing error correction and feedback,etc.Finally,this study aims to help high school English teachers and students to enhance the awareness of discourse and mother tongue transfer,and is expected to have certain practical significance and application value for promoting English writing teaching in high school and improving the English writing level of senior high school students.