英语论文网

Chapter I Introduction

1.1 Background of the research
With the pace of globalization of economy, English plays a dominant role in theinternational world as an international language. Thus, it is necessary for everyone tolearn it well in order to step into the whole world and communicate with theforeigners in English. Nowadays, more and more attentions and energies are paid tolearn English. In fact, English and Chinese belong to quite different language families,and they have different cultural background and their own ways to express. Chinesehigh school students have been learning English for decades from their primary tohigh school altogether. In the long process of learning English, they will encountermany difficulties and obstacles; one of the main obstacles is that they are inevitablyinfluenced by mother tongue in a negative way. What’s more, it is well-believed thatthe second language acquisition is a complex process.Since the middle of the twentieth century, cross-linguistic language or transfereffect has been the issue of research of second language acquisition (SLA). Manyresearchers and scholars both at home and abroad have made countless studies,provided the learner’s errors and at last concluded that how mother language affectsthem when writing compositions. In order to get the feedback about the subjects’cognitive process and their attitude towards writing, many methods such asinterviewing the subjects, compositions and questionnaires etc are adopted to solvethe gap between the two languages.The previous researchers and scholars at home mainly concern the phenomenonand description of negative transfer, while this thesis will focus on analyzing theerrors resulting from the influence and seek some efficient ways to overcome negativetransfer.
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1.2 Significance of the study
As is known to all, writing is a kind of cross-cultural communication behavior,and it is regarded as the most difficult and complex skill among the four mainlanguage learning skills. Many Chinese students may feel difficult to master thewriting competence when they learn English. “The process of writing is the process ofselecting, combining, arranging and developing ideas in effective sentences,paragraphs, and often, longer units of discourse”(Grabe & Kaplan, 1996). Variouskinds of errors can be presented in students’ composition. These errors are obviouslyinfluenced by their mother tongue, from which their comprehensive competence canbe shown clearly.The first and foremost, although they have mastered plenty of words, they maystill get countless errors on the lexical aspect. Second, there may be many errors onthe syntactic level. The last but not the least, many Chinese students don’t know howto put sentences into a proper composition. All in all, coherence and unity of thediscourse are still hard problems for Chinese students (Zhang Weizu, 2000).This thesis uses comparative analysis and language transfer as the theoryfoundation, studying the real impact of negative transfer of mother tongue, and seeksthe countermeasures to overcome the negative transfer. Finally, it aims to helpstudents gradually reduce the negative transfer and improve their English writingskills and English learning ability.
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Chapter II Literature Review

In this chapter, the theories of Language Transfer, Contrastive Analysis,Interlanguage Theory and Error Analysis will be stated