發(fā)布時(shí)間：2016-06-12 06:41

1   Introduction 

English  writing  as  an  important  part  of  English  learning  is  not  only  a  way  to  show students’ proficiency in English leaning but also a good way to communicate with others. It also shows students’ vocabulary and the ability to organize the article and to express correctly. If  students’  English  writing  gets  improved,  other  language  skills  such  as  reading,  speaking, listening  will  also  get  improved  as  these  language  skills  are  closely  related  to  each  other. However,  the  present  situation  of  senior  high  school  students’  English  writing  is  far  from satisfying. There appear a lot of problems in senior high school students’ English writing. And the present teaching method seems unable to meet students’ needs. Therefore it’s necessary to carry  out  a  research  about  senior  high  school  students’  English  writing.  Four  parts  will  be discussed in this chapter. The first part is the background of the study, which describes how the  author  came  up  with  the  inspiration  to  write  the  thesis.  The  second  part  describes  the purpose  and  significance  of  the  study,  which  shows  why  it  is  necessary  to  conduct  such  a research. The third part discusses the research questions. The last part is the organization of the thesis. 

1.1   Background of the study 
It’s a common sense that English plays a dominant role in the international world. It has become  more  and  more  important  for  Chinese  to  learn  English  well  and  communicate  with foreigners in English since the reform and open up policy. Many Chinese learn English at a really early age, however even after many years of study they can barely express themselves in English. This is especially true for senior high school students. Although senior high school students  have  learned  English  for  quite  a  long  time,  they  still  find  it  hard  to  write  a satisfactory  composition.  On  the  other  hand  writing  teaching  has  always  been  a  very important  and  difficult  part  of  English  teaching  in  senior  high  school.  And  in  the  entrance examination,  the  composition  part  takes  up  considerable  marks.  (1/6  of  the  whole  English paper). It’s hard for most Chinese students to get a satisfying resul t in their English writing. There are a lot of reasons for this. Among them the most important one is negative transfer of Chinese. According to the writer’s own teaching experience, when senior high school students try to write an English composition, they can never get rid of the interference of Chinese, such as Chinese ways of thinking, Chinese culture and Chinese grammar and so on. Since Chinese and  English  belong  to  two  different  language  systems  (Chinese  belongs  to  Sino---Tibetan Family,  while  English  belongs  to  Indio---European  Family),  they  are  apparently  different  in many aspects. Chinese senior high students learn English long after they have acquired their mother  tongue,  which  is  a  complete  language  system.  Whenever  the  students  try  to  write something  in  English,  they  will  outline  what  they  want  to  express  in  Chinese  and  then translate the Chinese sentences into English, which leads to some negative transfer caused by Chinese grammar in the writing.
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1.2   The Purpose and Significance of the Study
For most English teachers, it’s easier for them to notice the influence of Chinese thinking pattern  in  the  process  of  English  teaching  of  writing,  especially  in  the  aspects  of  the organization  of  the  article  and  usages  of  language.  However  most  of  the  mistakes  appear because of the negative transfer of Chinese grammar. It is Chinese grammar that interferes the students  to  express  properly.  Therefore  the  author  thinks  it  necessary  to  figure  out  the differences between Chinese and English grammar by comparing the two languages. And try to  find  out  the  phenomenon  that  reflect  the  negative  transfer  of  Chinese  grammar  in  Senior High school students English writing, so that the teachers can focus on these errors and try to use  some  teaching  approaches  such  as  comparing  Chinese  with  English,  grammar  training exercises,  enhancing  the  input  of  good  English  sentences  and  passages  to  overcome  these negative transfer, aiming at improving Senior High School students’ English writing. On the other hand, most of the English teaching activities take place in the schools and most  of  the  students  learn  English  in  a  society  where  people  speak  Chinese.  Students  can hardly  have  any  chances  to  speak  or  use  English  out  of  class.  And  most  of  the  language material  resources  come  from  the  text  books,  English  newspaper,  magazines  or  videos. Students can only speak English with their teachers, classmates or few foreigners. They lack the  English  environment.  What’s  more,  Chinese  students  begin  to  learn  English  long  after they  have  acquired  their  mother  tongue,  and  they  have  already  have  a  Chinese  language system. So when the students try to write in English or express themselves they rely heavily on  Chinese,  they  try  to  translate  what  they  think  in  Chinese  into  English. 
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2   Literature Review

In this chapter the definition and classifications of transfer theory and the conditions and factors  of  language  transfer  are  discussed.  What’s  more,  some  researches  about  language transfer at home and abroad are covered in this part.  

2.1   Language Transfer While
learning  a  second  language,  learners  tend  to  turn  to  their  knowledge  of  their mother  tongue  which  has  already  been  stored  in  their  mind.  Obviously,  this  is  a  kind  of transfer. If learners’ mother tongue promotes second language acquisition, it is called positive transfer.  On  the  contrary  if  it  hinders  second  language  acquisition,  it  is  called  negative transfer. The word “transfer” is a term in psychology, which dates back to the 1950s. According to H.D. Brown(2001), “transfer means the learners apply their previous knowledge or behaviors to their new learning”. For a hundred years language transfer has always been an important research  topic  in  the  fields  of  applied  linguistics,  second  language  acquisition  and  language teaching. Ellis defines transfer as a hypothesis of the effect of the learning task A on that of task  B.  And  he  claims  that  transfer  is  perhaps  the  most  important  concept  both  in  teaching practice and teaching theory.(Ellis,1956).Afterwards, about twenty years later, James replaces task A with mother tongue ,i.e. first language and task B with second language (James ,1980). That is how the term language transfer came into being. Dechert and Raupach put forward a notion that transfer is the fundamental principle of human cognition between the known and unknown,  between  the  old  and  the  new  as  well  as  between  language  and non-language(Dechert＆Raupach,1989) 
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2.2 Related Studies at Home and Abroad 
Since  transfer  theory  was  put  forward,  there  have  been  a  lot  of  studies  and  researches about  second  language  acquisition  related  to  transfer  theory.  There  appear  many  famous linguists both at home and abroad.  A  lot  of  empirical  researches  have  been  made  to  uncover  the  negative  transfer  of learners’  mother  tongue  since  1970s.  Dulay  and  Burt  have  studied  the  output  of  learners whose  mother  tongue  is  Spanish  and  who  learn  English  as  their  second  language.  After  the study,  they  conclude  that  only  3%  of  all  errors  from  the  corpus  of  the  Spanish-speaking learners  are  the  result  of  Spanish  interference,  which  probably  means  English  and  Spanish bare some similarities between each other, while other linguists are not that agreeable with the findings  of  Dulay  and  Burt.  Coder  and  Ellis  also  carried  out  a  lot  of  experiments  about  the effect of negative transfer of learners’ mother tongue and they also published a lot of papers about this topic. They tend to draw a conclusion that most of the transfers could be found at phonological, lexical, syntactical and semantic levels. In 2012 Tanin Ionin carried out a study investigating  dominant  language  transfer  from  English  in  adult  Spanish  second  language learners and Spanish heritage speakers. The purpose of the study is to contrast properties of English  and  Spanish  definite  articles  with  respect  to  generic  reference  an  inalienable possession. The subjects of the study are 30 Spanish heritage speakers and 30 L2 learners of Spanish completing four written tasks (acceptability judgment, truth-value judgment,picture- sentence  matching  and  sentence-picture  acceptability  judgment).  The  results  show  that heritage Spanish speakers and L2 language learners exhibited dominant language transfer of English during second language acquisition in the aspect of interpretation of definite articles in generic contexts.  
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3 Theoretical Basis ..... 9 
3.1 Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis ............ 9 
3.2 Error Analysis ......... 10 
3.3 Inter-language Theory ....... 11
4 Research Design .... 13
4.1 Research Questions ........... 13 
4.2 Subjects ......... 13 
4.3 Instruments .... 13 
4.3.1 Questionnaire .......... 14 
4.3.2 Pre-test ........... 14 
4.3.3 Post-test ......... 14 
4.4 Procedures of the Research ......... 14
4.5 Data Collection and Analysis ...... 19 
4.5.1 Analysis of the Questionnaire ..... 19 
4.5.2 Analysis of the Pre-test ..... 20 
4.5.3 An Analysis of Post-test .... 21
4.6 Results and Discussions .... 21   
5 Conclusion ............ 31 
5.1 Major Findings ........ 32 
5.2 Limitations of the Thesis ............. 33 
5.3 Suggestion for Future Study ........ 33 

4 Research Design 

Based  on  the  transfer  theory,  contrastive  analysis  theory  and  error  analysis  theory, research  design  will  be  presented  in  this  chapter,  including  research  questions,  subjects, instruments, the procedure of the research and data collection and analysis. 

4.1 Research Questions 

This thesis tries to answer the following questions: (1) What kind of the mistakes in senior high school students’ English writing are caused by the negative transfer of Chinese grammar?  (2) Why do these mistakes appear in their writings? (3)  How  is  the  negative  transfer  of  Chinese  grammar  overcome  by contrasting  English with Chinese and comprehensive training approach? The author picked out two science classes from the second grade in BoHai Senior High School as the subjects of the research. One class is chosen as experimental class, in which the teacher adopts the new teaching approach and the other is chosen as control class, in which the teacher uses traditional teaching approach. The two classes were picked out randomly, so the result is very reliable. The reason why the author chose grade two students is that unlike grade  one  students  they  have  already  achieved  some  English  knowledge  and  they  have adapted to the new life in senior high school, and unlike grade three students whose learning task  is  very  stressful  since  they  have  to  prepare  for  the  entrance  examination,  grade  two students  have  enough  time  and  energy  for  the  experiment.  So  the  author  chose  grade  two students  to  carry  out  the  experiment.  The  students  from  the  two  classes  have  the  same background, since they are from the same grade. Their writing skills are almost at the same level.  And  what’s  more  they  are  instructed  by  the  same  teacher,  so  it’s  easy  to  control  the teaching method. Some basic information of the subjects is as follow:（see table4.1） 

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Conclusion 

The first part of this chapter presents the major findings of this thesis, followed by the limitations of the study and some suggestions for future study.Senior high school students’ English learning is still under development, whose mother tongue  is  fully  skilled  at  the  same  time.  What’s  more,  English  and  Chinese  belong  to  two totally  different  language  systems.  Therefore,  it’s  easy  for  them  to  get  interfered  by  the negative  transfer  of  Chinese,  especially  Chinese  grammar,  during  the  process  of  English learning. Firstly, by analyzing the result of questionnaire, the author found that most students hold the  view  that  they  are  easily  influenced  by  Chinese  grammar,  when  they  try  to  write  an English composition. They also consult Chinese quite often while they are writing an English composition.   They  are  more  likely  to  think  and  organize  their  compositions  and  then translate  the  Chinese  sentence  into  English,  which  easily  cause  errors.  According  to  the sample compositions collected in students’ exams. The main errors students tend to commit are  at  morphological  level,  syntactic  level  and  also  some  other  level  like  punctuations  and spelling mistakes. The area in which students tend to commit errors most is syntax including omission of subjects, omission of link verbs, misuse of word order, misuse of tense and voice, and misuse of fixed combination. Following the syntactic errors are errors at morphological level, which include misuse of nouns, articles, case and part of speech. The main reasons that lie behind these errors are the negative transfer of Chinese grammar. The original differences between  English  and  Chinese  languages  can  inevitably  cause  errors  in  students’  English learning, especially English writing. 
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The reference (omitted)

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