Xinjiang Within The High-class Students' Language Use And Language Attitude Survey

In the late 1990's, the Chinese government launched a policy of setting up classes for Xinjiang students in inland senior high schools. From then on, the scale and number of enrollment kept expanded. A new pattern is then set as running education in different areas, which plays important role in the development of national education and personnel training in Xinjiang. Therefore, it will be of some reference value in improving individualized education, teaching quality and running the specific classes inland by means of investigation into those Xinjiang students' language uses and language attitudes, as well as the impact of attitudes on their academic performance.This study, taking Xinjiang minority students in the specific classes of Beijing Luhe School and Shanghai Qibao School as the object, investigates into their language use and language attitude, and studies the impact of new environment on their language uses and attitudes. On the basis of the survey, the paper analyzes the impact of the language use and language attitude on their academic performance, and points out problems. It is intended to compensate the deficiencies in the present research, and make proposals for improving the academic performance of those Xinjiang students in the inland-senior-high-schools and the teaching quality, and thus offer basic data for a further study. The study is based mainly on fieldwork by observing what languages ordinarily used by the students, and attending lectures to observe what languages used by the students discussing different topics. On the basis of this tentative investigation, it takes a stratified sampling method to conduct a questionnaire survey of the language use, language attitude, and academic performance for the students with different genders, nationalities and sources in preparatory, grade one, and grade two of the two high schools. Furthermore, it inquires into the measures taken by the schools, and how the students adapts themselves to the new situation by interviewing with the administrators of teaching, tutors, class teachers, the inland-high-school students, and inland students. It uses e-mail and Bulletin Board System of the inland-high-school as supplementary to the related issue. On the basis of fieldwork, the contrast and comparative methods are adopted to analyze the Xinjiang students' language use, language attitude and language capability in the specific classes of Beijing and Shanghai.The research reveals the following points: the students from Xinjiang in inland senior high schools made a lot progress both in Chinese and English; the higher the grade the much progress is made; their native languages are mainly used when they communicate with other Xinjiang students while Chinese is their most exposed language; they love their native languages but regard Chinese and English having more functions. The scores of language courses for these students often fluctuate greatly in grade one, which affected by the great changes of language environment and teaching, as well as their individual language attitude. While English examination scores tend to be stable.The average scores of both Chinese and English tests for Qibao school students show no obvious difference, on the opposite, the scores for Luhe reveal distinct differences not only in each language test but in their study phase. This is due to the different patterns of teaching and examination in the two schools.