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Negative Transfer and the Teaching in College English Writing



Author(s)

LIN Shan-ling, WEN Yan

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DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2013.10.001

University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China

In learning a second or foreign language, the learners’ mother tongue has a big effect on it. The influence of the mother tongue is called language transfer in foreign language research. The language transfer can be positive or negative transfer. Negative transfer quite common in writing is a weak point for students and also a difficult teaching point for teachers. In this paper, the common errors which are due to the negative transfer of mother tongue in the process of writing in English are collected and analyzed in lexical, syntactic, and discourse aspects. Then, some possible ways to avoid negative transfer in English writing are suggested.

negative transfer, errors, English writing