L1 Negative Transfer and L2 Writing Performance: Error Categorization and Analysis on Chinese Students’ English Writing

• Main Authors: Yi-Hsiuan Wang, 王怡璇
• Other Authors: Yu-Ching Tseng
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/fu66j7

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 101 === The negative transfer from Chinese causes errors in Chinese students’ English writing and also impedes students from reaching better English writing performance. This study aims to categorize and analyze errors in Chinese graduate students’ English writing from the perspective of Chinese negative transfer. The study has three purposes: (1) Showing structural differences between hypotactic English and paratactic Chinese to establish a classification for analyzing English L2 learners’ errors. (2) Finding evidence of L1 negative transfer at word level on Chinese students’ English-writing pieces. (3) Finding evidence of L1 negative transfer at syntactic level on the same written data. The participants are seven graduate students from Tamkang University. They are required to write English reflections after reading the resource articles with the input language from their L1 and L2. Errors in students’ written data are categorized and analyzed at two stages: (1) Chinglish analysis and (2) syntactic analysis. The Chinglish analysis includes: (1) Lexical analysis and (2) grammatical analysis. The syntactic analysis contains: (1) intra-sentence level and (2) inter-sentence level. The study also qualitatively examines the degree of Chinese interference in each error category under the variable of different language inputs in the two writing tasks. The research further includes the third resource article to examine whether the background knowledge of the writing topic also impacts on students’ writing performance. A qualitative examination of the three writing tasks reveals a relation between input languages and errors at syntactic level and the impact of background knowledge on errors at lexical level. The findings highlight the importance of structural differences between learners’ L1 and L2, the input languages and background knowledge of the resource article when teaching English writing. The comparison between the target construction in L1 and L2 also serves an awareness-raising approach to prevent students from making transfer errors.