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difference. When the American college students were given the similar topics, theyusually wrote poorly, but if they were given different topics, they would do better. But as faras Chinese students were concerned, their writings were poorer no matter what topics theywere given. This showed that with English being their foreign language, the Chinese collegestudents' poor linguistic competence should be mainly responsible for their poor writings.Therefore, a study aimed at improving students' linguistic competence and writing ability isnecessary.

1.2.2 The Significance of the Research
Cross-lingual study composes an essential part in language learning, teaching，andresearch. Consequently, the study of transfer is virtually significant. Since English is the mainforeign langixage in China, many experts have been investigating how to teach and learnEnglish as a second language without being interfered with the transfer of native language. Itwas reported that transfer by Chinese learners of English occurred at all levels，phonetic,lexical, semantic，and syntactic. Through the analysis, it's found that transfer does exist in theprocess of second language acquisition, and almost all the students are affected by transfer ofmother tongue, especially by negative transfer. It's also found that the more the studentsexpose themselves to the target language, the fewer negative transfer they commit. The fourskills in language learning，as is well known, are listening, speaking, reading and writing.Writing is usually considered to be the last acquired skill in language learning, becausecompared to the other language skills, writing is the most difficult (Sun，1995). D. Nunan(1991) also confirmed this belief by saying that writing is a complicated process and beingable to write well is usually considered to be the last skill in language learning; few people"*can feel relaxed and light-hearted when faced with a formal writing task. Writing is said to bedifficult for both native and non-native speakers of a language，especially for the latter.However it is very important because one's overall abilities in language learning can beshown in "writing. He Zhuli once pointed out (1998):

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Transfer
The term 'transfer" was originally derived from the Latin word "transfer," and was usedas a technological term meaning "to bear，” "to print, to impress，，，or “to copy (as a drawing orengraved design) from one surface to another". ( Webster Third New World Internationaldictionary，1986:2427). However，it was not until in the 1950、and 1960’s that the termbecame popular among linguistics. When introduced into the field of language learning,language transfer, as Rod Ellis (2000) points out，means the influence that the learners' firstlanguage exerts over the acquisition of second language. In Psychology, transfer refers to thephenomenon of previous knowledge being extended to the area of new knowledge, i.e. theinfluence which the learning or remembering of one thing has on the learning andremembering of another thing' (Sajavaara，1986:69). While its meaning developed, "transfer"could also be used to mean ''to carry-over or generalization of learned responses from onetype of situation to another," especially “the application in one field of study or effort ofknowledge, skill, power, or ability acquired in another" (Webster本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。