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Nevertheless, the existing imperfectness should not be overlooked. For one thing, most previous studies focus on the English writing of university students while fewer on middle school students. For another, most studies of middle school teachers probe errors from an overall viewpoint, but few of them have specific discussion on errors caused by negative transfer. On the basis of above consideration, this thesis will focus on the writing errors caused by negative transfer of Chinese in middle school students and give some detailed account of how these errors are caused. Two research questions are as follows:
1. What are the manifestations of negative transfer of Chinese in the middle school students’ English writing?
2. What are the causes of negative transfer of Chinese in the middle school students’ English writing?
The study presents an investigation into negative transfer of Grade nine students in the city of Ningbo. In order to explore the above research questions, data is collected and analyzed in qualitative and quantitative ways. And retrospective interviews are applied to distinguish “errors” and “mistakes” for the accuracy of the data. Answers from these interviews also contribute to cause-study.
The aims of this study are twofold. The significance of the study lies in finding out the manifestations of negative transfer in middle school students’ English writing by means of combining theory and practice. The theory system of negative transfer in SLA has been fully discussed and detailed. This study has well validated the influence of negative transfer of native language. Through this study, more typical and elaborate results from an investigation into middle school students is expected to be added into the existing theory system. What’s more, the other aim of this study is to arouse awareness among both learners and teachers of negative transfer in students’ writing and to provide reference for middle school English teachers in their writing teaching so as to reduce the influence of negative transfer in students’ English writing.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Studies on negative transfer
Language transfer, a central issue in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), has been a controversial topic in various aspects, from its definition, significance, to its role in application, such as language teaching.
With the rise of Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) in1950s, the term transfer is first raised at the same. CAH, which was first stated systematically by Robert Lado in 1957, is the core of the theory of language transfer. The study of language transfer relies greatly on the systematic comparisons of languages provided by Contrastive Analysis (Odlin 1989: 28). CAH is the comparison between the linguistic systems of two languages. By the large, the bigger the differences between the two languages, the greater the difficulties will be. Lado (1957) attributes learning difficulty to differences between the target language difficulty, and the native language, which could be summarized as “difference=difficulty “hypothesis.
As is mentioned, the definition of transfer is such a hot and controversial topic that according to Dechert and Raupack’s statistic (1989) from Language Transfer in Language Learning(1983), “there are at least 17 different versions of definition about language transfer”(Yu Liming 2004: 3). Schachter（1974）claims that transfer is a restriction in language learning. While Corder（1983）regards transfer as an interaction strategy, namely, borrowing, and this transfer in learning process belongs to construction transfer. Transfer is thought to be a psycho-linguistic process, in which learners are motivated to use their mother language’s knowledge or interlanguage (Faerch &Kasper 1983). They believe that transfer in learning has been formed as some rule in learners’ interlanguage rather than in the process of using the target language.