Analysis On English Learning Mechanism Of Tibetan Middle School Students In A "Tibetan-Chinese-English" Language Environment From The Perspective Of Cognition

Under the background of the world economic globalization,English has been used more and more in international communication.Being one of the most important parts of education in minority area,English education takes a great role for the development of the economy and impacts the intercommunication between minority area and the intemational stage.Taken the Tibetan middle school students from Aba Zang and Qiang Autonomous prefecture,Sichuan province as the sample,this study was accomplished by focusing on the English education in Tibetan area.The result of this study showed that the English education in this area is in a really serious status with various kinds of restrictions that held up English teaching and learning such as the lack of English language environment,being without enough English teaching equipment such as multimedia,supplementary learning materials and so on,being lack of English teachers as well as a relative low level of English language proficiency of parts of the teachers,and the paradoxical attitudes of the Tibetan middle school students even their parents towards English learning,the language transfers of Tibetan and Chinese,and the Tibetan middle school students' internal mechanism.Aimed at the following four topics:1)What are the subjective attitudes of the Tibetan middle school students towards English learning?2)Whether Tibetan and Chinese languages themselves will cause some language transfers to English learning for Tibetan middle school students?3)Whether the psychological mechanism,knowledge and cognition structure of Tibetan middle school students will influence the input-output process of English learning?4)What kind of an internal learning mechanism the Tibetan middle school students have in the English learning process in the trilingual environment?This thesis analyzed the English learning mechanism of Tibetan middle school students in "Tibetan-Chinese-English" language environment based on both theoretic foundation and accompanied with empirical research.Six chapters are included totally.In Chapter one,the introduction,research background, research questions and methods,and the significance of this study were introduced.And Chapter two is the literature review,it set out the relative theroies in order to support this study.Chapter three is contrastive analysis on the three languages-Tibetan,Chinese,and English,it analyzed from the point of view of linguistics the postive and negetive transfers caused by both Tibetan and Chinese in the English learning process.In the main part of this thesis,Chapter four,the internal mechanism of the Tibetan middle school students in English learning process,including the cognitive process and the influence of the psychological mechanism,and the systems of knowledge and cognition structure of the Tibetan middle school students in the input-output processes of English learning,was analyzed in detail.At the same time,this chapter analyzed other elements which influence the English learning,for example,age,motivation, ethnic identity and other individual differences.Chapter five is about the empirical research,questioners and data collection were finished in this chapter and statistic proofs for the questions discussed in chapter four were concluded. The last chapter,Chapter six is the conclusion of this thesis.It summarized the analysis of this thesis and put the answers to the four questions at the beginning out accompanied with some implications and suggestions on the option of teaching language,improvement of English curricular and applications of teaching strategies.Based on the theoretical analysis and two experiments,the thesis reached to the following conclusions:Firstly,because of the backward economy and the relative isolated life state, there is no English language environment for the Tibetan middle school students to practice English.Therefore,these students do not have strong self-awareness on the importance of English learning.And many Tibetan middle school students even their parents have formed the paradoxical attitude towards English learning that on one hand,they were attracted by English language and its peculiar culture, but on the other hand,they do not have a better opportunity to learn it more and use it for international communication.Certainly,these two contradictive attitudes led these Tibetan middle school students lose interests and confidence gradually in English learning.Secondly,both Tibetan and Chinese would cause positive and negative transfers for English learning.But majority of the Tibetan middle school students preferred to use their native language-Tibetan to assist the comprehension of English.In fact,students who were in relative lower Chinese language proficiency would use more Tibetan in understanding the new language information.Meanwhile,the negative transfers caused by Tibetan and Chinese often overlapped and confused these Tibetan middle school students that lead a great many of mistakes on phonetic,intonation,grammar and syntax as well as reading comprehension and translation.About the learning mechanism of Tibetan middle school students in the "Tibetan-Chinese-English" language environment,it was believed by the writer that Tibetan middle school students would like to use the language which they are most familiar with to help assimilate and understand the target language information.For target information which is on various levels of difficulty,the systems of Tibetan,Chinese and English knowledge and cognition structure would overlap and form a complex network to influence the decoding and encoding processes.For some simple materials,Tibetan middle school students often used the system of English knowledge and cognition structure directly for assimilating and absorbing the target information.For some materials which are relative more difficult,the students were used to take Chinese as the teaching language to help understanding.And for materials that could not be understood through English or Chinese,the Tibetan middle school students could not find a better way but depended on their native language.Therefore,in the English learning,Chinese was the language used mostly for the Tibetan middle school students.Students with higher Chinese language proficiency would use Chinese more and on the contrary,Students who took advantages of Tibetan might have lower level of Chinese language proficiency.But generally,Chinese was still the language used maximally as the Tibetan middle school students are not good at English.