Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research background
The Chinese negative transfer has a great impact on the English study, which givesthe author the deepest impression in the process of English learning. It is regarded as themajor motivation of this research. Furthermore, based on the author’s teaching experience,a deal of negative transfer mistakes happen when Chinese learners are engaged in Englishwritings for a set of whole and systematic Chinese knowledge have been mastered beforethey study English.As the second language, English exerts a key function in exchange of other countiesall over the world. There are more and more Chinese people to learn English due to theglobal development. Chinese learners’ foreign language acquisition is impacted very muchby Chinese language. The errors and misunderstanding is often caused by Chinese negativetransfer in English writing of Chinese learners, which decreases learners to gain the foreignlanguage ability in the daily communication. As one of the major manners ofcommunication in different countries, English writing can get great success, which relieson whether ideas and views can be expressed rightly by English learners.The Current New English Curriculum Standards ask the learners in middle schools togain these purposes of language skills between the sixth grade and the eighth grade. TheCompulsory Modules(1-5) and Elective Modules (6-8) will be completed by the learners inJunior Two, which are asked to gain these writing aims of the eighth grade purpose. That isto say, they should have enough ability to repeat or write overview based on theinformation which has been read so that passages can be written or reported relying on themessage offered by vocabulary or tables. The essays can be written according to coherentmeanings and whole structures, and things can be narrated or their ideas and attitudes canbe expressed by using level forms and fluent sentences (English Standards, 2003:5－ 12).
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1.2 Significance and purpose
The transfer of native language should be focused on in the procedure of learners’foreign language acquisition (FLA) or second language acquisition (SLA) because of arather developed L1 system having advantage in their remembers. It has been received thatthe sentence is regarded as the important element to communicate with each other. Thenegative impact from L1 is known partly on the sentence standard based on the researchdata, the reason why any language has its own principles to set up suitable sentences, andthe learners often change the syntactic structure or componential elements between Englishand Chinese. Ellis (1994) finds out that the mother language is treated one of the keyreasons that have great impact on gaining second language, although many reasons such asover-generalization, avoidance, learning methods and fossilization cause the learners tomake mistakes. The transfer of the mother language, especially the negative transfer hasbeen considered as hot topic by linguists and language teachers since the mid 20thcentury.The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis is put out by Linguists Lado (1957), that is to say, thenegative transfer of native language has become the important trouble in the procedure oflearners’ second language requisition, and the learners often make some mistakes easily. Itis difficult for learners meet to predict and analyze the disparity from the native languageto the target language.
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Chapter Two Literature review
2.1 Definition of language transfer
There are seventeen definitions for language transfer at least, according to the statisticfrom Language Transfer in Language Learning by Gass&Selinker. (Yu Liming, 2004:3)Forexample: Colin Baker& Sylvia Prys Jones (1998: 703) defined language transfer as:"theeffect of one language on the learning of another". Jarvis& Pavlenko(2008:1)thought thatlanguage transfer is "the influence of a person's knowledge of one language on thatperson's knowledge or use of another language". Above all, Odlin's definition(1989: 27)iscomparatively thought the best, which defined it as "Transfer is the influence resultingfrom the similarities and differences between the target language and any other languagethat has been previously acquired (and perhaps imperfectly acquired)". However, Odlinhimself thought his own definition is not good enough, as he said(1989: 27)"This, it shouldbe stressed, is only a working definition, since there are problematic terms within thedefinition."The importance of language transfer has been seen through a variety of differentdefinitions in foreign language teaching (SLT), but the immature is also revealed in thisaspect.As a psychological perspective, transfer is often defined as the phenomenon ofprevious information learned influencing new information, which has impact whichsomething is learned or remembered has results on another thing which is studied orremembered.
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2.2 Classification of language transfer
Transfer is made up of two forms including positive and negative transfer because ofcertain impact on gaining second language knowledge. Positive transfer often refers tolearners without errors when the target language is applied based on the knowledge of their own mother language. That means first language has good impact on L2 study. It canhappen when there are the same forms both the target and native languages, which enhancestudents to learn L2. However, negative transfer often refers to errors made by learners inthe learning procedure, which the differences between L1 and L2 may lead to. The positivetransfer can improve the L2 acquisition, but negative transfer can decrease the L2acquisition. This study will explore negative transfer to analyze by which method the L1have side-influence on L2 learning to enhance further to know the negative impact of L1on L2 acquisition so that suggestions are proposed for L2 teaching and learning.
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Chapter Three Research methodology .......17
3.1 Research questions ......17
3.2 Research participants..........17
3.3 Research instruments..........17
3.3.1 English writing test.........18
3.3.2 Questionnaire ..........18
3.3.3 SPSS ..........18
3.4 Research procedure .....18
3.4.1 Writing test .......19
3.4.2 Questionnaire ..........19
3.5Data collection.......19
Chapter Four Results and discussion .........20
4.1 Result......20
4.2Results analysis .... 26
Chapter Five Conclusions ...... 37
5.1 Major findings ..... 37
5.2 Implications for English language teaching ......... 37
5.3Limitations..... 41
5.4 Suggestions for further research ...... 42
Chapter Four Results and discussion
4.1 Result
The different grades of the scores exist in the sample, which ensures the truth andvalidity of the study. At last, the author invited the postgraduates to find out the errors inthe 60 writing compositions and pointed out the errors possibly caused by the Chinesenegative transferAccording to the statistic of the author, 1274 errors occurred in the 60 English writingcompositions,1016 of which are caused by the negative transfer of Chinese language and258 of which are not resulted from the negative transfer (table 4-2). It can see from thetable that 79.75 percent of all errors in English writings of the middle students are causedby Chinese negative transfer. Although some of negative transfer errors can't be explainedby the language transfer theory, they occur indeed with the factors of Chinese interference.The numbers and percentage of the errors are showed as the following table 4-2.
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Conclusion
According to the analysis of the experimental data, the author offers the majorfindings in this part.
(1)It is found that 79.75 percent of all errors in English writings of the middle highstudents are caused by Chinese negative transfer. And 20.25 percent are caused by othersources.
(2)The main types of errors caused by the Chinese Negative Transfer in the Englishwriting test are from four parts. They are Morphological Errors ,Lexical Errors ,SyntacticErrors and Text Errors, including 19 branches- Capitalization, Punctuation, Case, Number,Tense/aspect, Articles, Pronouns, Prepositions and Conjunctions, Adjectives and Adverbs,Derivative Words, Selection and Collection of Words , Omission , Subject-PredicateConcord , Order of Words , Avoidance , Run-on Sentences , Overuse “we” in Text ,Coherence and Cohesion of Discourse and Thinking Patterns. Also, Syntactic Errors hasthe biggest slice of all the error types . The Thinking Patterns own the biggest percentagein the whole branches.
(3) After analyzing the scores of the writing and the amount of negative transfer ineach chosen students’ test, it is found that the degree of being influenced by Chinesenegative transfer and the writing scores appears negative correlation.
(4) The Chinese thinking patterns of students really influence the English writing.
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Reference (omitted)