汉语语法负迁移对高中生英语写作的影响
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）
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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