1.1 Research Background
With the economic and global development, the world is becoming smaller and smaller,and the communication between people is getting closer and closer. In order to meet thedemands of communication and understand each other, a kind of universal language isrequired. And English has gradually become the international language in the world.Therefore, people of different countries in the world are studying English now. In China, thenumber of the English learners is increasing year by year. People have begun to realize theimportance of English learning.Speaking and writing are the important productive skills in four basic skills of listening,speaking, reading and writing, and they have aroused many people’s attention, especially thewriting skill. This kind of skill can investigate the comprehensive condition of learners’mastering the language ability. English writing is not the language activity but the thinkingactivity. Thought pattern influences the rhetoric method and the basic laws of the discourseorganization. Robert B. Kaplan (1966), an American famous linguist, collected nearly 600English writings written by students living in America with different cultural backgrounds.Then he analyzed these papers and drew the conclusion that the people with different culturalbackgrounds have different thought patterns, and this reflected in the different discourseorganizations. Then he continued that although the Chinese students have mastered theEnglish Grammar, the writings look some awkward, the main reason is that the negativetransfer of thought patterns. He published the Cultural Thought Patterns Inter-culturalEducation, and then he pointed out the differences of discourse thought patterns.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
The purpose of this study is, firstly, to find out the influence of the native language onthe English writing and in which aspects they reflected, secondly, is to analyze the nativelanguage transfer in the writing from the aspect of discrepancies between Chinese andWestern thinking modes, and thirdly is to provide some efficient and feasible suggestions tohelp students avoid the interference of the mother tongue and improve their English writinglevels.Therefore, this present study is very important for both students and teachers. As for thestudents, it will help students understand the Chinese and Western thought patterns. Then itcan help them avoid using the mother tongue thinking to write the English composition. Thus,it will improve the students’ language sensitivity and the English writing level. As for theteachers, it can help teachers enlarge the scope of knowledge and skill levels.
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2 Literature Review
2.1 Language Transfer
Transfer, a basic concept, originates from psychology, which refers to the phenomenonthat the previous knowledge influences the learning of the new one. The influence of learningone thing has on the learning of another thing. (Sajavaara,1986:69) And it forms thepsychological foundation for “language transfer”.Over a century ago, the psychological term “transfer” was used in language whenWhitney firstly employed the term to refer to the cross-linguistic influence. But it was notuntil the 1950s and 1960s that the term “transfer” became popular among the linguists. Inforeign language learning, transfer refers to the，英语论文题目，英语论文范文
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