Abstract

Based on the previous studies of mother tongue transfer, this thesis mainly discusses the influence of Chinese negative transfer on English writing. The function of language is to communicate. Writing, as a written form of communication, is undoubtedly one of the important ways to realize this function. Because Chinese and English belong to different language families, there are many differences in Chinese and English morphology, syntax, idiomatic expression and so on. Students often write English compositions under the influence of Chinese, which results in many mistakes. Therefore, this paper analyzes the errors in English writing of middle school students from the perspective of negative transfer. It mainly discusses the errors in terms of English and Chinese morphology, lexical level, syntax, textual level and rhetoric aspect to demonstrate that Chinese does have a negative effect on middle school students’ English writing. In order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of students’ writing, this paper presents solutions to the problems. At the same time, these countermeasures are expected to be helpful to teachers.

Keywords: middle school English writing; Chinese negative transfer; countermeasures 

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1.Introduction1

2.Literature Review2

2.1 Definition of language transfer.2

2.2 Classifications of language transfer2

2.3 Previous studies at home and abroad.3

3. Analysis of Negative Transfer of Chinese in middle school English Writing4

3.1 Morphological level.4

3.2 Lexical level 6

3.3 Syntactic level.9

3.4 Discourse 10

3.5 Rhetoric aspect11

4. Countermeasures of Negative Transfer of Chinese in English Writing12

4.1 Defining words in English12

4.2 Increasing English input.13

4.3 Increasing the comparison between English and Chinese.13

4.4 Focusing on text structure analysis 14

5. Conclusion14

Works Cited.16