The Influence of Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue on College Students’ English Writing and its Countermeasures

Case based on X University

Abstract

The phenomenon of negative transfer of mother tongue is common in English learning of college students in China, which involves listening, speaking, reading, writing and so on. This phenomena of negative transfer in writing are typical, including lexical level, grammatical structure level and text level. There are many reasons for the negative transfer of mother tongue, including subjective factors of students themselves and teachers, as well as some objective factors. The negative transfer of mother tongue is the main problem that should be overcome in the process of language learning. If it can not be solved effectively, college students will have many grammatical errors in the process of English writing, and the content and structure of the article will be chaotic and lack logic. It seriously hinders the improvement of their writing ability, thus affecting the overall effect of college students’ English learning. This thesis will review the theory of language transfer and related studies, and on the basis of a brief overview of the theory of mother tongue transfer, it tends to analyze the main factors of mother tongue negative transfer on college students’ English writing and the specific performance of mother tongue negative transfer in college English writing. Besides, targeted strategies will be proposed to solve the phenomenon of mother tongue negative transfer in English writing.