Research on the Influence of Native Language Transfer on the Use of Conjunctions in English Writing by Chinese College Students

Abstract

Among the four basic skills in English learning, writing has always been regarded as the most difficult one for Chinese college students to master. Errors often occur in the process of college students' English writing, and negative transfer from the mother tongue is an important cause of these errors. Due to the interference of negative transfer, many Chinese college students are unable to apply the English knowledge they have learned to write authentic English articles. The use of conjunctions is one of the important means of cohesion in English discourse. This paper analyzes the use of conjunctions in English writing by Chinese college students from the perspective of mother tongue transfer, attempts to analyze the reasons for the misuse and omission of conjunctions by Chinese students. The problem of the use of conjunctions has become an important bottleneck restricting the improvement of the quality of English writing by Chinese students. Based on the perspective of language transfer theory, this paper systematically examines the deep influence mechanism of the Chinese thinking mode on the use of English conjunctions, revealing the typical phenomenon of the misuse of conjunctions due to excessive reliance on the Chinese feature of parataxis. The research further proposes targeted teaching intervention strategies from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, including increasing English reading volume, emphasizing contrastive teaching between English and Chinese, setting appropriate conjunction exercises, and developing a corpus-based intelligent error correction system, aiming to fundamentally improve the English writing ability of Chinese learners.