A New Exploration Into Factors Affecting Chinese Minority Students' English Learning

In view of the common situation that Chinese minority students'English proficiency level falls behind that of Han students, this thesis aims at exploring the factors affecting Chinese minority students'English learning from new perspectives.A review of previous researches on Chinese minority students'English learning is made with the conclusion that in the past two decades, there have been only a small amount of researches, few of which are grounded on sound theoretical foundations or empirical studies. There has not been a systematic study on the factors affecting Chinese minority students'English learning so far, it is therefore important to conduct this research in order to find effective ways to maximize their favorable factors while minimizing their unfavorable ones. This research lays foundation on interlanguage theories by thoroughly reviewing the factors affecting the interlanguage system and the mechanism of language transfer in the context of third language acquisition. Combining with the author's personal practice, this thesis employs the instruments of questionnaires and interviews, and discovers that it is social and linguistic factors that cause negative influence on students'English learning and consequently result in their poor English level.This thesis argues that the social factors, which include language educational system for Chinese minority students, their English teaching conditions, as well as cultural background, exert a deep influence on Chinese minority students'English learning. From the perspective of interlanguage theory, their effects lie in aspects of discourse input, learning strategies training, motivation, language aptitude, and age. This analysis makes this thesis different from any previous discussion on this issue. The explication of linguistic factors takes Tibetan students as an example. Based on the contrastive analysis of three languages (Tibetan,...