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.