Abstract

As the overall language ability have been pay more and more attention, students’ communication ability is been more emphasized. As one of the basic skills of language knowledge, writing can fully reveal senior high school students’ language communication level. Senior high school students are in the primary stage of English learning, it is hard for them to make sentences or compositions with English as their poor vocabulary and sample sentence patterns. So they would rely on their Chinese thinking in English writing, which cause obstructions to students’ English writing learning. Consequently, it is clearly that how important the influence of negative transfer is in second language learning process.

Based on contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage, the author explores the influence of negative transfer in English writing teaching from three aspects: morphology, vocabulary and syntax. And the proposed research have the empirical investigation in English writing teaching of students in class 22 of grade 2 in Xiangzhou First Senior High School in Xiangyang, Hubei Province by used of questionnaire, text analysis and classroom observation to analyze common errors in senior high school students’ English writing. Then the author found that negative transfer plays a significant role in senior high school students’ English writing and put forward effective suggestions of teaching strategies. The proposal of the author is aimed at cultivating students’ English thinking and transforming negative transfer to positive transfer, then improving senor high school students’ English writing.

Key words: Negative transfer; Positive transfer; Contrastive analysis; Error analysis; Interlanguage

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1  Introduction-1

2  Literature Review-3

2.1 Transfer-3

2.2 Language Transfer-3

2.2.1 The Definition-3

2.2.2 Classification of Language Transfer-4

2.3 Main Approaches to Language Transfer-4

2.3.1 Contrastive Analysis-4

2.3.2 Error Analysis-5

2.3.3 Interlanguage-6

2.4 English Writing Teaching-7

2.4.1 The Result Approach-7

2.4.2 The Process Writing Approach-8

2.5 Summary-8

3  Research Design-10

3.1 Research Questions-10

3.2 Research Objects-11

3.3 Research Methods and Procedures-12

3.3.1 Research Methods-12

3.3.2 Research Procedures-12

3.4 Statistics-13

3.4.1 Questionnaire Analysis-13

3.4.2 Text Errors Analysis-14

3.5 Summary-15

4  Data Analysis-16

4.1 Morphological Level-16

4.1.1 Articles-16

4.1.2 Number of Nouns-17

4.1.3 Misapplications of Tense and Voice-17

4.2 Lexical Level-18

4.2.1 Metaphrase-18

4.2.2 Lexical Collocation-19

4.3 Syntactic Level-19

4.3.1 Subject-verb Disagreement-19

4.3.2 Subject Deletion-20

4.3.3 Word Order-20

4.3.4 Sentence Structure-20

4.4 Summary-21

5  Conclusion-22

Appendix-23

Bibliography:-26

Acknowledgments-27