The Negative Influence of Chinese L1 on English L2 Writing

Abstract

L1 is, generally, believed to affect the acquisition of second language negatively. Because there is likely to be a negative transfer form L1 to L2, when the learner lacks sufficient knowledge for communicating his or her ideas in L2 and then draw upon the L1. The transfer includes both positive and negative transfer. However, the role of L1 is more often viewed as negative, causing negative transfer that results in a variety of errors. Generally, English and Chinese do not have many of the shared syntactical features. Hence the syntactic transfer is predictable when using the L2. This may lead to such errors as those in the noun phrase, in the verb phrase and various omissions. This paper analyses those errors in English writing, which represent the negative syntactic transfer from Chinese to English. Moreover, it discusses in details the particular causes for that transfer and propose improving the awareness of the syntactic distinction between these two languages in Chinese students.