Key words: negative transfer from Chinese English writing, influence Chinglish Abstract: Language transfer is a common phenomenon in the language learning. Language transfer is the influence resulting from the similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously acquired. This paper presents the importance , the current phenomenon of the Chinese students’ English writing and the influence o f Chinese cognition and culture on the students’ English writing .In the third part , it puts emphasis on making a contrastive study of the different characters between Chinese and English while analyzing the various mistakes in Chinese students’ English writing caused by the negative transfer from Chinese on the levels of lexis, syntax and discourse. The purpose is to minimize the negative influence from Chinese and improve students’ English writing.
Different countries have different cultures , which is known to us. “Culture is the collective programming of the mine which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another”(Hofstede , 1991). There is never co—existence between two language systems in the learners, but constant conflicts are mainly on cognition and culture. The mistakes made by students in the writing during their English learning come from the interference of Chinese on English, which is called cultural conflict , that’s to say, culture transfer. Transfer is a psychological term, which refers to the influence of previous learning on subsequent learning. Transfer is the influence resulting from the similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired. (Odlin, 1989) Language transfer is a common phenomenon in the language learning. Language transfer is the effect of one language on the learning of another. (Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics, 2000) In the process of the foreign language learning, learners will unconsciously bring the pronunciation, lexical, grammatical structures, and thoughts of the mother tongue into the target language. As a result, the mother tongue has some influence on the target language. This phenomenon is called language transfer. Language transfer includes positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer refers to the transfer in which language learners’ knowledge of the mother tongue improves the acquisition of the new knowledge of the target language. Negative transfer, also called interference, is the phenomenon in which language learners use the models or rules of their mother tongue in the target language, resulting in the output of the informal or even wrong expressing forms of the target language. In the English language learning, Chinese students try to utilize some mother tongue features more than that of the English language during learning. English writing is one of the output ways of language, and it is a process from deep structures to surface structures. From what to write to the output composition, it may take students quite a lot of steps to finish the writing tasks, that is, from their thoughts to words, sentences, passages and contexts. In this process, students may make a lot of mistakes caused by the negative transfer from their native language---Chinese.
2.1 why learn to write As we all know , writing is more and more important in life , business and so on with the development of society. So writing is an important task in the students’ English learning .And that is why writing is an important part of the teachers’ job. “Students learn to write by writing, and they learn to write correctly by writing, revising, and proofreading their own work”---with some help or direction from the teacher when it is necessary. They do not learn to write correctly by studying about writing or doing isolated workbook exercises unrelated to their own writing. The most important technique a teacher can use to guide students toward grammatically correct writing is to let them write, let them write things related to their own experiences. There is no limit to the kinds of text the teacher can ask students to write. Teachers’ decisions should based on how much language the students know, what their interests are., then guide the students to write.
I am the teacher in senior high school English. When I and other English teachers discuss the process of marking student papers, we often have dissatisfaction and frustration over the problem of dealing with the errors in student writing -----the most mistakes in grammar. The students often create Chinglish. Sometimes we spend hours at night with papers but I’m not sure the students get as much from it as the time I spend on it. Most students find it very dispiriting if they get a piece of written work back and it is covered in red ink, underlings and crossing-out. It is a powerful visual statement of the fact that their written English is terrible. Of course, some pieces of written work are completely full of mistakes, but even in these cases, the teachers should achieve a balance between being accurate and truthful on the one hand and treating students sensitively and sympathetically on the other.
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