Abstract

Writing is an important process of language learning and one’s writing ability can well embody his language learning competence. But many Chinese college students, even those major in English, also have difficulty in English writing. Although many teachers and scholars have been probing into ways of teaching English writing effectively, most of them concern on the negative language transfer of Chinese culture. But recently a few of them showed that students' ignorance of the differences between Chinese and English thought patterns contributes a lot to the problem. When it refers to negative transfer of Chinese thought pattern on college students’ English writing, they concern on lexicon, phase and linguist parts, while I prefer to study paragraph writing. So, this paper first gives a brief introduction to thought pattern and the relationship between thought pattern and language, then analyzes the main differences between Chinese and English thought patterns, followed by a description of the negative transfer of Chinese thought pattern in college students' paragraph writing, and finally proposes some practical and effective methods to help Chinese students learn to think as what native English speakers do and improve their writing ability.

Keywords: English writing; Chinese college students; negative transfer; thought pattern

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction-1

1.1 Research background and significance-1

1.2 Literature Review-2

1.2.1 Related Studies on Negative Transfer of Chinese Culture in English Writing-2

1.2.2 Related Studies on Negative Transfer of Chinese Thought Pattern in English Writing-2

1.3 Methodologies of study-3

2. Theoretical Framework-5

3. Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and English Thought Patterns-7

3.1 Visual Thinking VS Rational Thinking-7

3.2 Tortuous Thinking VS Straight Thinking-7

3.3 Subjective Thinking VS Objective Thinking-8

3.4 Imaginative Thinking VS Abstract Thinking-8

3. 5 Dialectical Thinking VS Logical Thinking-8

3. 6 Synthetic Thinking VS Analytical Thinking-8

4. Problems from the Study about Negative Transfer of Chinese Thought Pattern at the Level of Paragraph Writing-10

4.1 Human-centered narration-10

4.2 Sentence cohesion in paragraph-10

4.2.1 Ambiguous subjects like using “it” ambiguously-10

4.2.2 Inter-sentence relationship: broken expression-11

4.2.3 Improper position of top sentence-11

4.2.4 Loose relationship between top sentence and evidence statement-12

5. Strategies for Decreasing the Negative Transfer of Chinese thought pattern in College Students’ English Writing-14

5.1 Raising Students’ Awareness of the Negative Transfer of Chinese Thought Pattern-14

5.2 Increasing Comparative Analysis in English Paragraph Writing Teaching-14

5.3 Requiring Reading English Essays and Imitate Native Way to Write Paragraph Critically-14

5.4 Train Students to Construct the Connection of English sentence in paragraph with the Formal Logic Thoughts.-15

6. Conclusion-16

References-17