An Empirical Study Of The Influence Of L1and L2on Mongolian Students’ Acquisition Of Their Third Language Sentence

Third language acquisition is a relatively new area of study in theapplied linguistics. It has both sociolinguistic and psycholinguisticfoundations. This thesis is intended to report an empirical study of theinfluence of Mongol and Chinese on Mongolian students’ acquisition oftheir third language sentence. The subjects of the present study are116L1-Mongol, L2-Chinese, and L3-English freshmen at Inner MongoliaNormal University. The study undergoes two phases. In the first phase,the subjects are asked to fill out a language background questionnaire. Inthe second phase, they are required to take a Chinese-English translationtest which contains5declarative sentences and5interrogative sentences.Through quantitative analysis, the results of the study demonstratedthat Mongolian students whose Mongol and Chinese scores are higher inthe National College Entrance Examination got higher scores in theirEnglish as well. However, Mongol-Chinese-English trilingual learners ofdifferent L1and L2proficiency levels are not remarkably different intheir L3syntactic production. Meanwhile, the results reveal that lowEnglish proficiency results in the greater negative transfer from Mongoland Chinese. For example, errors in interrogative sentence order and inthird person singular form are common in those whose Englishproficiency is lower. What’s more, the results show that Chinese playsmore a positive role in Mongolian students’ English declarative sentencelearning, since declarative sentence order in Chinese and English issimilar. Besides, Mongol plays more a negative role in their Englishdeclarative sentence learning for different sentence order Mongol andEnglish follow. However while learning English interrogative sentence,neither Mongol nor Chinese can play positive role, because of thedifferent sentence orders they follow.As a conclusion, the present study emphasized that English is a thirdlanguage for Mongolian students, which is different from Han nationalitystudents’ acquisition of English as a second language. When studying Mongolian students’ English acquisition, transfer from Mongol alongwith transfer from Chinese should be taken into consideration. Thereby,any decision on the Mongolian students’ English learning in InnerMongolia should be based on the characteristics of Mongolian students’third language acquisition, and the cross-linguistic influence involved init. Besides, English teachers for Mongolian students in Inner Mongoliashould enhance the positive transfer from L1and from L2to L3in theprocess of teaching.