The Impact of Negative Language Transfer on English Writing of College Students: A Case Study

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-02-2_71How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Negative transfer; English writing; Tense; Mechanical translation; Punctuation

Abstract

In the recent 20 years, a lot of research efforts have been made about the negative transfer of Chinese language in English writing. The research subjects of them were mainly college students and high school students. The hot topics include error analysis, learners’ characteristics, thinking mode, teaching implications and strategies and so on. These efforts offered valuable insights to the teaching and research in this filed. But among all the research on the writing performance of college students, the research subjects were mostly from the long-established colleges. The performance of the students from the newly-established private colleges (the performance of whose students were comparatively not as good because of realistic reasons) is not given enough attention. To better comprehend the level of these students, this paper conducted an empirical research to analyze the types and distribution of these students’ errors. It is found that the errors are largely syntactical, and most of the errors fall into the following categories: improper tense shift, mechanical translation, and punctuation. Suggestions are made to teachers such as making a more comprehensive study of the differences between English and Chinese, having more collections and analyses of the error types, paying more attention to the teaching of tense and so on. It is hoped that this research is valuable to teachers and researchers making a research in this field in the future.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Houqing Liu
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/11/14
TI  - The Impact of Negative Language Transfer on English Writing of College Students: A Case Study
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Education: Current Issues and Digital Technologies (ICECIDT 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 652
EP  - 665
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-02-2_71
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-02-2_71
ID  - Liu2022
ER  -