3。 The writing tasks of Grade7 are quite different from those of Grade8 and Grade9。 Relatively speaking, Grade7 students are practicing simpler writing tasks, such as the handwriting of 26 English letters, the dictation of the learned words, phrases and sentence patterns, and the most difficult one --- the composition by the given information。 Different from Grade8 and Grade9, Grade7 students’ writing is highly confined to vocabularies and tenses: they have a small vocabulary, so their writing tasks are actually the sentence making of the learned sentence patterns; they only have knowledge about present tense, limiting them in relatively simple sentences。论文网

Combined with previous researches and my own findings, I did a case study on Chinese negative transfer in Grade7 students’ English writing, trying to find out the types and percentages of Chinese negative transfer errors and their causes。 At the same time, this thesis provides several practical suggestions to improve students’ writing by overcoming Chinese negative transfer, which has a great significance on English writing teaching。

1。4 Framework of the paper 

This paper consists of the following five chapters:

Chapter One offers a brief introduction to the research background as well as the purpose and significance of the study。

Chapter Two provides a literature review on language transfer, which is made up of four parts, the definition, the classification, the theoretical studies of language transfer and the researches at home and abroad。

Chapter Three shows the design of the study。 The research questions, subjects, instruments and procedures are discussed in this part。

Chapter Four presents a detailed description of the results and explanations of the outcomes。 The negative transfer errors are analyzed from the perspective of morphology, lexicon, syntax and text in this part。

Chapter Five draws a conclusion of this paper and also provides some pedagogical implications for English teachers to help students reduce the errors caused by Chinese negative transfer in English writing。 In addition, the paper points out some limitations and suggestions for future research in this area。

II。 Literature Review

2。1 The Definition of Language Transfer

    Transfer was first put forward as a psychological term, namely, learning A can affect learning B, and the affect can be positive or negative。 When it is applied in second language acquisition, we can find that at least seventeen definitions have been given to language transfer by linguists according to the statistics from Language Transfer in Language Learning by Gass & Selinker。 For example, Colin Baker & Sylvia Prys Jones (1998:703) thought that “language transfer is the effect of one language on the learning of another; Jarvis & Pavlenvo (2008:1) defined it as “the influence of a person’s knowledge of one language on that person’s knowledge or use of another language”。 Among all the definitions, Odlin’s (1989:27) is accepted by most scholars: “Language transfer is the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously acquired (and perhaps imperfectly acquired)”。 

2。2 The Classification of Language Transfer

Like “transfer” in psychology, “language transfer” also has two sides: positive and negative language transfer。 Lado (1957) points out that the degree of difficulty of learning L2 depends on its differences and similarities with L1。 When L1 and L2 share many similarities, positive transfer can occur, making it easier to learn L2; if L2 is widely differed with L1, negative transfer may arise, impeding the process of learning L2。

2。2。1 The Definition and Features of Positive Language Transfer

When the similarities occur between two languages, the leaner’s knowledge of L1 will help learn L2。 These facilitating impacts are called positive language transfer。 Some examples of positive language transfer are listed as follows:文献综述