Chinese Morpheme and Syntax Based Negative Transfer in High School Students’ English Writing

Abstract

In the context of an increasing focus on international communication, most students in China choose English as their second language. However, their English learning will be affected by their mother tongue in terms of the language transfer theory. On this basis, learners of a second language will inevitably be influenced by the thinking pattern of mother tongue, errors frequently occur in the Second Language Acquisition called negative transfer. This paper aims to investigate the impact of negative transfer about Morpheme and Syntax on Chinese high school students' English writing by collecting 80 English essays from 24 Chinese high school students. Specifically, we divide the errors found into 5 categories: Errors in Determiner, Errors in Tense, Errors in Subject-predicate agreement, Errors in the plural form of Noun, and Errors in the complementizer of Clause, to analyse the impact of the negative transfer. According to those primary data, there is an interference in high school students' writing. Besides, the numbers of errors in the plural form of Noun and Tense reflections are relatively higher than others, which are attributed to the morpho-syntactic differences between Chinese and English. Our results also indicate that the reason for the existence of different errors can hopefully help learners to understand the way to address such a problem in the future. These results shed light for the reduction of errors in students' English writing with the emphasis of the morpho-syntactic differences between languages.