Mandarin as the First Language Causes Negative Transfer in English Writing to Non-English Major College Students

Abstract

L1 transfer represents the process that mother tongue would impact learners’ second language acquisition. Prior knowledge from their first language would be consciously and unconsciously applied to their target language learning as an aid. Furthermore, positive and negative influences would be asserted in this process. To be specific, negative transfer or interference would be the focus foci of this article. Considering numerous research done by linguistics and educators from home and abroad, English writing in China has faced serious barriers mainly due to the mother tongue negative transfer, such as phonological, morphological, lexicon, syntax, and discourse errors. Therefore, this article concerns some typical errors that non-English major Chinese college students would make in writing. The house of error analysis regards that language transfer covers a majority of errors, which could be used as lubricants to facilitate Chinese college students’ English writing skills. Hence, it is of significant essence that at the end of this article, several suggestions with reference value are advanced, desiring to contribute to the improvement of Chinese college students’ writing capacity.