Acknowledgements I would like to express my appreciation to a number of people for their invaluable assistance in preparation and development of this thesis.

My deep indebtedness goes to my supervisor, Professor for his patient guidance and invaluable instruction throughout the study. Without his insightful advice and kind encouragement, the completion of the present study would have been impossible.44296

My most sincere thanks also go to the sixty students and their English teacher Miss Huang who have spent their precious time in doing the experiment. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to get the data for my thesis. 

An Investigation into Negative Transfer of Chinese in Middle School Students' English Writing

Abstract

The negative transfer of mother tongue, Chinese, in students’ writing has been discussed at home and abroad for many years. So far, the studies on negative transfer effect are largely conducted in terms of the university students or adults, while researches on middle school students’ writing are comparatively few. Therefore, it is of significance to investigate negative transfer of Chinese in middle school’s English writing.

The participants involved in this study are sixty middle school students from Ningbo. Error analysis and criterions of equivalent translation are adopted to analyze and classify the errors in their compositions. And the causes of these errors are discussed according to the perspective of negative transfer. Furthermore, all error-makers are involved in the follow-up retrospective interview. The results show that the majority of the errors are from negative transfer. And some potential causes of the manifestations like insufficient input of English are discussed in this thesis. Based on the above findings and relevant theories, several suggestions on English writing teaching are put forward, in the hope of reducing negative transfer of Chinese in middle school students’ English writing.

Keywords: negative transfer of Chinese; English writing; middle school students; errors

初中学生英语写作中母语负迁移的调查

摘要国内外学者专家对英语写作中的母语（如中文）负迁移问题已经进行了多年的讨论研究。然而，这些研究多以成人学习者作为研究对象。相对而言，以初中生为研究对象的研究有待进一步深入，因而具有一定的意义。

本研究对象来自浙江省宁波市某中学的60名初三学生。通过收集他们的作文，采用错误分析法对其中的错误进行归类\吹冰|文'论"文:网www.chuibin.com，从负迁移的角度探讨错误产生的原因。此外，还对在作文中有负迁移错误的同学进行了访谈。研究发现学生英语写作中的错误有较多来自母语负迁移。同时，研究也发现了一些可能引起母语负迁移的原因，如英语输入不足等。最后，本文根据研究结论尝试提出了英语写作中减少或避免母语负迁移影响的对策，希望能为中学生写作教学提供一些有价值的参考。

毕业论文关键词：母语负迁移；英语写作；初中学生；错误

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 3

2.1 Studies on negative transfer 3

2.2 Studies on negative transfer in writing 4

3. Methodology 8

3.1 Participants 8

3.2 Instruments and procedures