中学生英语写作中母语的负迁移影响分析

论文总字数：28642字

摘 要

母语的负迁移影响在中学生学习英语过程中一直是一个主要的障碍。且中学生处在学习英语的初级阶段，写作可体现学生在语言输出过程中的语言运用能力。对于英语老师来说，如何帮助学生有效提高英语写作水平一直是一个亟待解决的问题。本文基于相关的理论基础以及国内外的研究现状，首先叙述了课程标准中的相关要求以及当前中学生英语写作的现状之间的矛盾，指出了本论文研究的重要性。接着从词汇、句法、语篇各层面分析了英语写作中的典型的母语负迁移现象，并进行了剖析和描述。最后，在此基础上提出中学英语写作教学中合理的策略以尽量减少母语对英语写作的负迁移影响。

关键词：负迁移；汉语；英语写作；中学生

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

3. Significance of the Study 3

4. Analysis of the Negative Transfer in English Writing 4

4.1 Lexical level 4

4.1.1 Synonyms 4

4.1.2 Part of speech 5

4.1.3 Word collocation 6

4.2 Grammatical level 7

4.2.1 The tense 7

4.2.2 The voice 8

4.2.3 Word order 8

4.3 Discourse level 9

5. Implications and Suggestions 10

5.1 Facing up to the transfer scientifically 10

5.2 Strengthening the basic practice of language knowledge 11

5.3 Strengthening the training of western thinking modes and expression 11

6. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

In china, middle school students are mostly exposed to Chinese in their daily life, so they are much more familiar with the expression way of Chinese than that of English. But with the development of china and deepen international communication, English has become an important ability for us to express ourselves. A person who can write well is usually considered an excellent English learner because he can express his ideas and feelings freely. With the same reason, in our English teaching process, writing is always been regarded as the weakest skill compared to listening, speaking and reading for Chinese students during the process of learning English. (Wang Jianqin, 2007:34) This is because that in china, most students begin to learn English in 7 or 8 years old or even later in some poor areas after they have had a good command of Chinese. Undoubtedly, they have formed the Chinese way of expression and thinking mode which will inevitably influence their learning in English at that time. As an important way of language output and an effective way of evaluating students’ learning, writing has a great value to study t language negative transfer.

Concerned with the Chinese negative transfer on English writing, quite a few scholars have done researches in this field for many years and achieved a lot. However, what deserves to be mentioned is that most of the researches have been concentrated on the English writing of college students but few studies in this field has been carried out to analyze the Chinese negative transfer on middle school students’ writing and little pedagogical implications about the negative transfer have been proposed. Actually the level of middle school students’ writing can be seen clearly because they are often required to write a composition as the last part of an examination, thus their writing materials are of great value to be studied. So it is possible and necessary to do a research systematically on the Chinese negative transfer on middle school students’ composition. Before writing the thesis, 90 compositions written by some senior high school students in a midterm examination are collected and careful analysis are made on them. According to the analysis of this research, the author found that the students writing mistakes are mainly attributed to three aspects of Chinese transfer: lexical, grammatical and discourse. It is clear that students always have good ideas but some sentences can hardly been understood when written down, which makes the teachers sometimes lose their head in correcting their writings. Therefore, the thesis is trying to find out the main reasons of negative transfer and propose some implications and strategies to overcome the influence of negative transfer on English writing.

2. Literature Review

Transfer is a psychological term, which refers to the phenomenon of a learned behavior being extended to the grasping of another new skill. Yet, the theory on language transfer had not been proposed until 1950s. The notion of transfer then was related to the behaviorist theories closely and Lado introduced the term into the field of second language learning. Then Odlin defined language transfer as “the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired” (Odlin, 1989:14). It is common in the learning of a foreign language, especially at the early stage of learning.

Since the 1980s, language transfer has been not only considered as a result，but also regarded as a process. Just as proposed by Gass and Selinker, it is not a mechanic transfer of the linguistic structure from L1, but a complex cognitive mechanism involving many factors.（Selinker, 1983:52）Brown H.D. pointed out that transfer is a cognitive process in which decisions of transfer are made on the basis of the learner"s perception of the similarity between first and second language structures. (Brown H.D., 2002:171)

Thus we can say that no agreement has been reached on it up to now, but we can conclude that the study area of language transfer has been highly valued. In a general way, transfer can be divided into two kinds: positive transfer and negative transfer (Selinker, 1983:201). Positive transfer, which means that the original habits in their mother tongue promote the second language learning can be explained by the example of “她是一个善良的女孩” .It is easy for middle school students to translate such sentences for the reason that Chinese and English have some common points in grammar and usage, thus the students can master the foreign language in a certain degree by their mother tongue. In such case, Chinese plays the role of positive transfer. Conversely, negative transfer, which means the original habits in their mother tongue have negative effects on the second language learning, also plays an significant role in language learning for middle school students. Take the sentence“他在一家银行上班”for example. Students tends to translate it into “He in a bank work”, which does not conform to English grammar. The cause is that prepositions are usually put before verbs in Chinese while the opposite often occurs in English. In such a typical case of English writing, the usage of mother tongue does negative effect on foreign language learning, hindering the correct expression of English writing for middle school students. Thus we can say students’ writing is language output materials, which are of great importance, because it provide valuable datum for research on second language learning.

In this paper, the typical errors which are caused by the negative transfer of Chinese in the process of middle school students’ English writings are collected and analyzed in lexical, grammatical, and discourse aspects for the purpose of finding out effective ways to overcome negative transfer in English writing.

3. Significance of the Study

Although Chinese negative transfer has been paid great attention and many scholars have been concentrated on the English writing of college students, it can be mentioned that few studies in this field was carried out to analyze the Chinese negative transfer on middle school students’ writings and little pedagogical implications have been proposed. However, learning English in middle school is of great importance for our Chinese students, because middle school is the foundation of the whole process of learning English, which has great effect on students’ future studies, even on their whole lives.

The National English Curriculum pointed out that the English teaching for middle school is to develop students’ comprehensive language competence and possess the basic ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing. (Cao Yamin, 2010:25)

However, most of the students can not meet the standard in the real learning situation. Students work hard on their writing, but their writing level is far from satisfactory. As a means of output, writing plays a significant role in middle school English teaching and it tests students’ ability of English application. According to the author’s observation of teaching status in middle school nowadays, Chinese negative transfer is complicated in middle school students’ writing. It has bothered the students and teachers so much for a quite long time. We find that students are racking their brains to express themselves in examinations only to write some sentences which are called “Chinglish”. On the other hand, for English teachers, the last thing they want to do is to correcting students’ composition, because they even do not know how to mark a score. In such a vicious spiral, both students and teachers try to elude English writing, leaving it still a big problem to be solved. So it is of great urgent for teachers and researchers to pay more attention to this field and propose some implications by analyzing the main errors in students’ composition.

4. Analysis of the Negative Transfer in English Writing

In order to achieve better results, the author collected 90 compositions in midterm examination of junior one middle school students of Wujiang Experimental Middle School. The requirement of the composition is to write a letter to your friends to tell him the importance of having good habits and the students are required to write no less than 100. Then the author analyzed students’ typical errors and find that these errors are mainly resulted from mother tongue interference. After careful analyzing, we basically divided these errors into three categories: lexical level, grammatical level and discourse level.

4.1 Lexical level

Vocabulary is the building material of language. The accumulation of vocabulary is not too much for middle school students thus they are usually limited by the vocabulary during writing. Besides, before starting learning English, middle school students have possessed a set of lexical system of Chinese, which inevitably causes interference during language learning. Here are the main types of negative transfer in lexical level.

4.1.1 Synonyms

Synonymy refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning. Words that are close in meaning are called synonyms. (Dai Weidong, 2006:66)The most typical example is the words “see”, “watch” and “glance”. We know that they have the same semantic meaning in Chinese, while they have little differences in meaning and usage in English. “See” can be used to be an outcome of an action perceived by sight or meet someone for some reasons. For example: “Seeing is believing.” and “I look forward to seeing you again.” While “watch” means look attentively and pay attention, which are usually used for something moving. For example, we usually say “watch TV” instead of “see TV”. As to “glance”, it means to give a quick and brief look. These differences are so tiny that the students hardly know how to distinguish them and choose the most suitable one for their composition. Here are two examples we find in the compositions we chosen:

(1) Wrong: My grandfather is 71 years old, but he never feels alone.

Right: My grandfather is 71 years old, but he never feels lonely.

(2) Wrong: I was divided from my parents since I was 12 years old, and it makes me more dependent.

Right: I was separated from my parents since I was 12 years old, and it makes me more dependent.

We attribute such errors in English writing to the fact that students can not distinguish the differences between these synonyms very well, so they just apply a word which has the same meaning in English mechanically.

4.1.2 Part of speech

In Chinese scientific literature, there are many cases that nouns are used as verbs and adjectives are used as verbs. (Halliday, 1999:193) In Chinese, we can hardly judge the part of speech of a word because no affixes are added to words to indicate its part of speech. The part of speech of a word can be judged when put into a complete sentence in a specific context. Chinese students tend to neglect the part of speech when writing English composition, which caused errors resulted from Chinese negative transfer. For example:

(3) Wrong: I think it extreme meaningful to exercise every day.

Right : I think it extremely meaningful to exercise every day.

In English, an adverb is used to modify an adjective. So in this sentence, adverb “extremely” should be used to modify the adjective “meaningful”.

(4) Wrong: Read newspapers every day is a good habit.

Right: Reading newspapers every day is a good habit.

In English, nouns are used the most frequently while in Chinese we use verb more. For Chinese middle school students whose mother tongue is Chinese, it is very difficult to realize this phenomenon. Here, the student took a verb as a noun by mistake.

4.1.3 Word collocation

In the process of English learning, English are quite different from Chinese in collocation structures. Although they are same in meaning, we have some rules and determined collocation in English. There is no reason why we choose this word in this sentence. When writing English Composition, middle school students usually translate what they want express literally according to our Chinese language habits, neglecting some rules and collocations in English which can not be explained with grammar. For example, there is such a sentence in a student’s composition:

(5)Wrong: It is a good habit to see books every day.

Right: It is a good habit to read books every day.

In this sentence, the student use a phrase “see book” to express the meaning of “看书” in Chinese. It seems to coincide with the Chinese in meaning. In fact, we use the phrase “read books” to express the meaning of “看书” in English.

Another error lies in the collocation of associated word. The most typical one is the use of “because” and “so”. For example,

(6)Wrong: Because I wake up early every day, so I am very healthy.

Right: Because I wake up early every day, I am very healthy.

Or I wake up early every day, so I am very healthy.

(7)Wrong: Though I am not very tall, but I can play basketball very well.

Right: Though I am not very tall, I can play basketball very well.

Or I am not very tall, but I can play basketball very well.

剩余内容已隐藏，请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：28642字