Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue in English

Many studies have shown that language acquisition has an important impact on Second Language Acquisition. The transfer of mother tongue falls into two kinds: positive transfer and negative transfer; positive transfer occurs when the habits of the two languages are similar; otherwise its negative transfer. Contrastive analysis, error analysis and inter-language theory have all deal with the negative transfer of language, which makes people understand native language’s negative transfer better and develops foreign language teaching. Chinese senior school students learn English on the basis of their Chinese. So they would be affected by their mother tongue and their knowledge. Based on that, the present writer wants to find out students’ problems in their English study by analyzing the mistakes according to language transfer theories. Such a study is also advantageous to the improvement of English teaching methods.