A Study on the Influence of Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue on College English Writing

Abstract

English writing is widely viewed as the most critical component among the four basic English skills. While college students command foundational vocabulary and grammar, they often fail to produce natural, idiomatic English writing, indicating the necessity of further research into English writing pedagogy. Guided by Language Transfer Theory and Error Analysis, this study randomly selected 372 students from Nanjing Forestry University, collected questionnaires and writing assignments, and quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed 163 valid samples, classifying errors into morphological, lexical, syntactic and discourse levels. The results show that college English writing errors are closely related to negative mother tongue transfer: 82% of students outline and revise in Chinese, showing strong reliance on their mother tongue; morphological errors account for the highest proportion (31.1%), followed by lexical (24.89%), syntactic (23.89%) and discourse errors (14.03%), with articles, noun number and verb misuse being the most frequent mistakes, mainly caused by linguistic and thinking differences between Chinese and English. This empirical study enriches relevant research on negative transfer and aims to provide pedagogical implications for college English writing teaching, helping students reduce the influence of mother tongue transfer and improve their English competence through joint efforts of teachers and students.