Negative Transfer in Chinese College Students' English Reading

Abstract

Contrary to what most Chinese higher education researchers believe, teaching practice shows that Chinese university students still have some difficulty in reading academic literature in English, and this is not caused by a lack of vocabulary. To investigate the impact that Chinese-based reading habits produce on Chinese university students understanding of the logic of English academic texts, 23 students were given a standardized English reading test covering ecology, zoology, economics, and cartography. Test results and post-test interviews reveal that most Chinese students were significantly better at understanding the meaning of single sentences than at sorting out the logic of the texts. When reading English literature, some students fail to correctly understand the role of logical adverbs and conjunctions, and even ignored logical words in the texts. As a result, the speed of reading English literature slows down and students fail to correctly understand the central content of the texts. This is caused by the different meanings and functions of different logical words in Chinese and English. The results of this study point out that there is a lack of training in the ability to sort out the logic of texts in Chinese higher English education and provide new teaching ideas for teachers who are struggling to improve students' ability to read English literature.