Language Transfer As Related To English Vocabulary Learning In Trilingual Education

Trilingual education is a three-language education in ethnic communities.As far as Inner Mongolia is concerned,its specific languages are Mongolian,Chinese,and English.This study aims to analyze the impact of trilingual education on Mongolian high school students’ English vocabulary learning from the perspective of language transfer and proposes improvement measures.The research hypothesis is that language transfers from Mongolian,Chinese,and English affect Mongolian students’ English vocabulary learning.The specific research questions are as follows:(1)What is the main reference language for Mongolian students to learn English vocabulary?(2)How does language transfer affect Mongolian,Chinese,and English in Mongolian students’ English learning?(3)How to help Mongolian high school students solve the problem of learning English vocabulary under the environment of trilingual education?Based on the theory of trilingual education and language transfer theory,this study conducted a questionnaire of English learning for 300 high school students from the Mongolian Middle School in Chifeng City,Inner Mongolia.SPSS 22.0 statistical software was used to analyze the difference and correlation of the questionnaires.Based on the preliminary statistics and analysis results of the questionnaire,the researcher selected 6 students and 3 teachers from the subjects who had received the questionnaire according to the interview outline designed in advance.The interview aimed to learn more about the difficulties of Mongolian high school students in learning English vocabulary.Finally,the researchers combined the results of questionnaires with those of the interviews to draw conclusions and put forward countermeasures for it.The results of the study show that Mongolian students begin to learn English fromelementary school,but the foundation is relatively not good.In the process of learning English,the reference language is mainly Chinese in terms of pronunciation and Mongolian in terms of semantics.Students think Mongolian and English are more similar.For the interest between second and third languages,students prefer to learn Chinese.In the Mongolian-Chinese bilingual learning process,they believe that Mongolian’s negative transfer to Chinese is greater than positive transfer;in Mongolian,Chinese,and English trilingual learning,Chinese’s positive transfer to English is greater than negative transfer,and Mongolian’s negative transfer to English is greater than positive transfer.Based on the above research results,this study has the following implications: In Mongolian students’ trilingual education,it is necessary to recognize the positive transfer between Mongolian and English: Mongolian students have gone through the process of learning their mother tongue.The social experience provides useful experience and support for their English learning.When learning English,students need to pay attention to the similarities between languages and improve learning efficiency.For negative transfer,from the perspective of language lineage,Chinese,Mongolian,and English belong to different language families,which makes learning difficult.The solutions are as follows: language contact is the basis of vocabulary learning;increasing foreign language contact and practice is an effective way to overcome interference with the mother tongue;in the process of foreign language learning,a good language environment should be created to improve the natural learning ability of vocabulary;excessive error correction is undesirable.