Abstract

The negative transfer of mother tongue, Chinese, in students’ writing has been discussed at home and abroad for many years. So far, the studies on negative transfer effect are largely conducted in terms of the university students or adults, while researches on middle school students’ writing are comparatively few. Therefore, it is of significance to investigate negative transfer of Chinese in middle school’s English writing.

The participants involved in this study are sixty middle school students from Ningbo. Error analysis and criterions of equivalent translation are adopted to analyze and classify the errors in their compositions. And the causes of these errors are discussed according to the perspective of negative transfer. Furthermore, all error-makers are involved in the follow-up retrospective interview. The results show that the majority of the errors are from negative transfer. And some potential causes of the manifestations like insufficient input of English are discussed in this thesis. Based on the above findings and relevant theories, several suggestions on English writing teaching are put forward, in the hope of reducing negative transfer of Chinese in middle school students’ English writing.

Keywords: negative transfer of Chinese; English writing; middle school students; errors

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1.-Introduction-1

2.-Literature Review-3

2.1-Studies on negative transfer-3

2.2-Studies on negative transfer in writing-4

3.-Methodology-8

3.1-Participants-8

3.2-Instruments and procedures-8

4.-Results and Discussion-11

4.1-Errors analysis and classification-11

4.1.1-Negative transfer in grammatical morpheme-11

4.1.2-Negative transfer invocabulary-13

4.1.3-Negative transfer in syntax-14

4.2-Interview-15

4.3-Causes of the errors-16

5.-Conclusion-17

5.1-Major Findings-17

5.2-Implications-17

5.3-Limitations-18

References-19

Appendix-21