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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 pided 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.