A Study On Negative Syntactic Transfer Of Uyghur(L1)in The English(L3)Learning Of Senior Bilingual Students

Language transfer has been a major topic in the field of second language acquisition and language teaching.Language transfer is an influence of the native language or the language knowledge previously obtained on a target language or a new language during language acquisition,it is generally divided into two types:positive transfer and negative transfer.With the developing of world economy,the language contact between the region and the nation is becoming more and more frequent.More countries and regions have begun to recognize the language of minorities.All these changes have laid a good foundation for the study of third language acquisition(TLA).Nowadays more and more people are pursuing the research of language transfer in third language acquisition.Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is a multi-ethnic region,it can be said that Xinjiang is a typical place of language areas.Uyghur nationality has the most population in Xinjiang currently.Bilingual education in Xinjiang mainly refers to the teaching of Chinese and other ethnic groups' language.A bilingual student of Xinjiang refers to the student who receives education both in Chinese and Uyghur Teaching language.Uyghur senior high school bilingual students learn English(L3)after learnt their mother tongue(L1)and Chinese(L2).So the process of their English learning is the third language acquisition.Due to their language environment,cultural characteristics and other reasons,difficulties of using English will arise in their English learning.“Individuals like to transfer the form and meanings of their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture.(Lado,1952:2)To explore the negative syntactic transfer of L1 in the English acquisition of senior bilingual students,the present study was based on the theories of transfer analysis,error analysis and contrastive analysis.50 bilingual students of No.8 Senior School were chosen as a subject for the study.The research questions are:(1)What are the syntactic structures that students tend to make errors easily?(2)Is there a negative transfer of mother tongue in these syntactic structures? The study was carried out through the writing task,translation task.Firstly,by carrying out the writing task,the study confirmed the types of syntactic structures which the bilingual students make errors easily:(1)the use of ‘preposition+ noun' functioning as adverb in asentence,(2)the use of copula Be as a linking verb and an auxiliary verb,(3)the placement of adverbs as very/very much/often/always/together,(4)the use of relative clauses,(5)there be sentence structure.Secondly,by carrying out the translation task,author further tested whether negative syntactic transfer exists in these five syntactic structures.According to the data analyzed in writing task and translation task,the author got the findings that Uyghur students are really affected negatively by the syntactic structures of their native language(L1)during English learning and suggested the ways to minimize the negative transfer in order to provide some insights in Uyghur bilingual students' English teaching and learning.