Negative Transfer of Grammar in Chinese Students’ English Learning

Abstract

In the present Chinese society, the population of second language learning students, especially English learners, is increasing due to the tendency of globalization. Because of different cultural backgrounds and language patterns, it is common for students to make grammar mistakes under the effect of negative transfer. Negative transfer in grammar can be divided into several features, including subject-verb disagreement, tense error, nouns and plural form error, incorrect use of prepositions, incorrect word collocation, and error in word order. The study of negative transfer is helpful to the development of English learning and English education. Therefore, this study reviews the Negative Transfer of Grammar in Chinese Students’ English Learning. The main findings include 1) subject-verb disagreement: grammatical disagreement, meaning disagreement, and proximity disagreement, in which grammatical disagreement is caused by negative transfer. 2) tense error: verb transformation errors and sentence structure errors. 3) nouns and plural form error: errors of “s” using and the misjudgment of the singular or plural of the subject. 4) incorrect use of prepositions: errors caused by prepositions that have the same meanings in Chinese but are distinguished more strictly in English. 5) incorrect word collocation: errors caused by cultural differences. People from different cultural backgrounds tend to be influenced by the word composition of their first language.  6) error in word order: introduces more complicated sentence structure that leads to errors, including transformation between statement and general question and place of adverb.