[毕业论文]高中生英语写作中负迁移现象研究A Study on Negative Transfer in Senior High School Students’English Writing.pdf

i 摘 要 写作能力是学生语言水平的综合体现， 是学生对所学各种语言知识的整体表 现形式。英语教学对于提高学生的书面表达能力起着至关重要的作用。在我国坚 持改革开放和世界经济全球化的进程中， 英语教学也越来越受到了国家和社会的 重视。 英语写作一直是高中英语教学的一个薄弱环节， 历年高考英语书面表达成绩 都不尽人意。选词、造句乃至谋篇布局都留下母语干扰的痕迹，存在大量母语负 迁移的现象。 本文从语言迁移的词汇， 句法， 语篇三个迁移层面及影响因素入手， 回顾了语言迁移各个阶段的理论发展， 通过收集教学实践中出现的母语负迁移实 例、问卷调查，试图探明母语负迁移在高中英语书面表达中的主要表现，并通过 对比错误分析方法，对这些现象进行深入的分析，提出一些最大程度上减少母语 干扰的对策，旨在探索一条提高高中学生英语书面表达水平的切实可行的道路。 语言迁移是一个十分复杂的现象。研究表明，在外语教学中，虽然不能否定母语 的积极作用，但是母语负迁移确实一直困扰着学习者，尤其是处于中学阶段的初 级学习者。然而，在我国基础教育阶段，许多外语教师对母语迁移现象没有全面 的认识，更谈不上进行研究。希望本文能唤起更多的中学外语教师对母语迁移现 象的关注，积极参与到此项研究中来。 关键词关键词:母语负迁移;英语写作;高中生 ii abstract english writing has been a weak point in english teaching of senior high school. results of nmet english writing have been far from satisfactory over the years. there commonly exists a phenomenon of negative transfer of native language at the levels of lexical, syntax and discourse in chinese students composition. based on the contrastive analysis hypothesis and error analysis theory, the paper reviews the history of language transfer, explores the phenomenon of the negative transfer in english writing by collecting and analyzing the errors from compositions by senior high school students, and gives feasible solutions to reduce the interference of native language as much as possible to improve their writing. language transfer is a complicated phenomenon. empirical studies have showed that the negative transfer of native language does perplex learners; especially the low-level ones in high school, though the positive role of the native language can not be neglected. however, in senior high schools of our country, a lot of teachers of english do not have an overall understanding of negative transfer of native language， let alone carry on researches. the paper attempts to draw more attention to the negative transfer of native language from more teachers of english in high school and calls on them to participate in the research with enthusiasm. keywords: negative transfer; english writing; senior high school students iii contents 摘摘 要要.i abstract . ii chapter one introduction . 1 1.1 research background . 1 1.2 research questions. 2 1.3 significance of the study. 2 1.4 organization of the thesis. 3 chapter two literature review. 5 2.1 the relevant studies on negative transfer. 5 2.2 the relevant studies on l2 writing.9 2.3 theoretical basis . 9 2.3.1 contrastive analysis hypothesis .11 2.3.2 the error analysis theory.12 chapter three methodology.15 3.1 overall design. 15 3.2 subjects. 15 3.3 instruments. 16 3.3.1 questionnaire. 16 3.3.2 collection of writing sample. 17 3.4 data analysis. 17 chapter four results and discussion.21 4.1 errors caused by negative transfer. 21 4.1.1 errors on lexicon level. 21 4.1.2 errors on syntax level. 25 4.1.3 errors on discourse level. 27 4.2 analyzing the causes of negative transfer. 29 4.2.1 from the perspective of language structure. 29 4.2.2 from the perspective of thinking pattern. 31 4.2.3 from the perspective of culture. 32 chapter five conclusion.35 5.1 the main findings of the study. 35 iv 5.2 pedagogical implications. 36 5.3 limitations and suggestions for the further research .37 appendix.41 bibliography.45 acknowledgements.48 东北师范大学硕士学位论文 1 chapter one introduction 1.1 research background in terms of skills, writing is of great importance in language learning. the ability to write in english is considered especially important since it helps english learners to improve their english learning. however, producing a coherent, fluent and extended piece of writing is probably the most difficult thing to do in language learning. it is something most native speakers never master. for foreign language learners，the challenges of writing in another language are even more enormous. students have a relatively large vocabulary but do not know how to use them to express their ideas, they are unable to write grammatically, they dont know how to vary their sentence structures when expressing the same meaning, and their written language input is too limited. among all the problems the students face, one draws researchers attention: most of the students would think in chinese first, and then write about the ideas in english. it is believed that this is the reason why the students produce chinese english: when they are asked to write in english, their mother tongue-chinese exerts an effect on their idea thinking, and on their choice of sentence structure and usages. on the one hand, english grammar has something in common with chinese, so chinese, to some degree, has a positive effect on the students learning. on the other hand, in the process of foreign language learning, the mother language will bring some negative effects to the learners, which affects foreign language learning. this phenomenon is what is called a negative transfer of the first language. because chinese english is produced just word by word according to chinese grammar instead of the normal way of using english, though it is easy for chinese to understand chinese english, it is not accepted by the people from english-speaking countries. chinese english prevent and attack normal english more or less. it destroys 东北师范大学硕士学位论文 2 the communication and influence the quality of chatting greatly. it brings lots of joke and foreigner couldnt make out the meaning. and when a foreigner communicates with chinese, they often find it hard to understand chinese english. it seems that the negative transfer of chinese is complicated in chinese senior middle school students writing. it has bothered the teachers and students too much for a long period of time. so far many researchers and teachers have done much in analyzing the negative transfer of the students english compositions in universities. but seldom of them focus on the english writing in middle school. so it is urgent for the teachers and researchers to pay more attention to this problem and try to solve it in english writing process. 1.2 research questions the objective of this research is to analyze the writing compositions of senior high school students, to find the influence of the negative transfer in the english writing and find some effective solutions to improve students writing ability. several research questions are raised in this study: 1. how is negative transfer represented on lexicon level? 2. how is negative transfer represented on syntax level? 3. how is negative transfer represented on discourse level? 4. what are the causes of negative transfer? 1.3 significance of the study language transfer has long been the center of researches in the fields of applied linguistics, sla and linguistics. as far as the functions or roles of mother tongue are concerned, it is still one of the hot topics worth further research. previous researches concerning lt tended to focus on the output of tl, with the prejudice of regarding mother tongue as an obstacle of sla. however, that is unscientific. as wen qiufang (1998) pointed, the involvement of mother tongue in the whole writing process is unavoidable and that its effects are dynamic instead of being static. she also added that mother tongue in the thinking process has different functions. generally speaking, 东北师范大学硕士学位论文 3 there are five functions: transformation, confirmation, generating ideas, retrieving l2 forms and controlling the writing procedures. considering the subjects of the research in wens essay, those with higher scores employed more l1 for transformation and confirmation and less l1 for the remaining three functions. according to what we have mentioned above, lt of mother tongue is not a mechanical process, but actually a complex cognitive process and the notion that mother tongue itself has either positive or negative effect is inappropriate. whats of great importance is to get to know clearly under what situations mother tongue has positive effect and otherwise, negative. as for the theoretical meaning of this research, it goes as follows: the process of english acquisition in our country is, in fact, a continual process of wise use of positive lt and getting rid of negative lt. with a brief review of the research results of the past half century of the present real situations of english writing, this research tries to give out efficient methods to improve senior middle school students writing ability. the research intends to get first-hand proof by getting involved in the whole research process, sincerely hoping to find out the existing relationship among lt, the participation of mother tongue and the output of sl. with more and more chances for english learners in china to communicate with english-speaking foreigners, it is essential to develop their communication competence in english and how to achieve the goal has thus become the primary task of education as well as the whole society. writing is such an important means of communication in written forms that its proper expressions of ideas and feelings directly determine the success of communication. 1.4 organization of the thesis this thesis consists of five chapters. chapter 1 provides the purpose and background of the study. it addresses the introduction, research questions, research background, significance of the study, and organization of the paper. chapter two focuses on the major theory of this study is positive and negative transfer in english writing. in addition, the theory of inter-language and intra-language is illustrated more or less. and more attention is paid to error analysis (ea), which will be adopted in the following study in chapter five, including some 东北师范大学硕士学位论文 4 past studies, the purpose of ea, the assumption, the procedure, the implication and the application of ea. chapter three depicts the research design, including the framework of the research design, the methods and instruments, specific participants, and data collecting procedures. chapter four is a report of findings. it presents the results of classification in details of the chinese negative transfer in english writing for the senior high school students on grammatical morpheme, vocabulary, sentence structure and context. the last chapter first summarizes the main findings of the study, and then it outlines the pedagogical implications some problems and possible solutions are also illustrated. the limitations of this paper have been put forward, and the final suggestions for future research are provided. 东北师范大学硕士学位论文 5 chapter two literature review 2.1 the relevant studies on negative transfer transfer is a psychological term, which can be traced back to over a century ago when whitney first used the term to refer to cross-linguistic influence (odlin, 1989). in psychology, transfer refers to the phenomenon of previous knowledge being extended to the area of new knowledge, i. e. the influence which the learning or remembering of one thing has on the learning and remembering of another thing (sajavaara, 1986: 69). however, it was not until in the 1950s and 1960s that the term became popular among linguists. now it is generally regarded as the influence of some kind of learning on the others. it is one of the basic conditions for learning because subsequent learning depends much on what has been learned in the past. language transfer took its root from the transfer theory in psychology. corder(1981), kellerman some often choose the inappropriate words: some ignore the cohesion of the sentences and the structure of the whole text; even more, the wrong punctuation and the bad hand writing make the texts having nonsense. according to analysis report on the results of changchun met，2007, the average score is13.25, 6.02% of the students getting 15 and even 7.23% of them getting zero(yangliangxiong, xuechangming, 2007). most middle school english teachers usually follow the traditional method of emphasizing grammar and vocabularies, aiming at helping students pass the examination for entering colleges and universities, which is one of the reasons why students writings are so poor. on the other hand，as well as social factors such as learners attitudes. motivations，and goals，several cognitive factors affect language learning. one of them is language transfer，which is related to writing errors. transfer is defined as the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously acquired (odlin, 1989). the study of transfer involves the study of errors (negative transfer)， facilitation(positive transfer) ， avoidance of target language forms， and their over-use(ellis，1994).behaviorist theories claim that transfer is the cause of errors， whereas from a cognitive perspective，transfer is seen as a resource that the learner actively draws upon in inter-language development (selinker, 1972).in other words， the li can have a direct effect on inter-language development by influencing the hypotheses that learners construct (ellis，1994)，owing to the differences in living styles，customs，habits，values，beliefs，modes of thinking and so on，so students find it hard to learn english well. what is more， as chinese and english belong to two different language families，their language usages and expressions sometimes are quite different，and thus negative transfer or interference occurs，resulting in errors. 东北师范大学硕士学位论文 11 2.3 theoretical basis i developed the thesis based on the contrastive analysis hypothesis and error analysis theory as presented as following. 2.3.1 contrastive analysis hypothesis the study of language transfer originated in contrastive analysis hypothesis (cah), which in turn found its origin in behaviorist psychology and structuralist linguistics of the 1950s and 1960s. lados study of language transfer was rather a contrastive one (1957). in his view, predictions are to be and can be made by comparing the similarities and differences between two languages (the learners nl and the tl), including their sound systems, their grammatical structures, their vocabulary systems, their writing systems and even their culture. difficulty is equated with difference whereas ease with similarity, because it is assumed that old habits will get in the way of the formation of new habits and thus hinder learning but similar or identical ones will not. however, it was challenged by odlin (1989:19), who argued that the approach has no predictive power and it can only be useful after the fact. ca is further developed by thompson whose analysis of the learners errors is mainly through the fl grammar. thompson (1987) sets a typical and valuable example of contrastive analysis between japanese and english, ranging from phonology to grammar. he presents a list of grammatical domains where japanese learners, in his view, will tend to make errors because of grammatical differences between japanese (l1) and english (efl). cah was strongly based on the psychological theory of behaviorism (skinner, 1957).according to behaviorism, all language learning was considered to be habit formation. yet, in contrast to a l1 learner, the l2 learner already has a set of language habitshis native language habits. according to behaviorist theory, these habits should be replaced by l2 habi