An Analysis Of Hani Minority Students' Acquisition Of Chinese In Yajiang Town

With continuous social development, the Chinese language has been gradually popularized across areas inhabited by the minority nationalities. Nevertheless, due to such factors as geographical region, culture and ethnic custom, the Chinese language used by ethnic minorities is characteristic of local ethnic features. The fact that ethnic minorities master Chinese is a manifestation of progress in the current era and a common phenomenon among school-age children in ethnic minority areas. Therefore,teaching Chinese to ethnic minorities should consider not only bilingual teaching of the minority language and Mandarin, but also the status-quo that minority students acquire Mandarin through local Chinese dialects.This paper focuses on the example of the language use in Yayi Township of Mojiang Hani Autonomous County, with a questionnaire survey and analysis on the Chinese acquisition among local Hani students and an introduction to common local languages for communication including Hani language, the local Chinese dialect by Han Chinese and the local Chinese dialect by the Hani people. Then, the paper studies the environment, order and type of Chinese acquisition among local Hani people to put forward the role of the communicative interlanguage(local Chinese dialect by the Hani people) and the teaching interlanguage(Mandarin by the Hani people) in the process of Chinese acquisition. Moreover, several local languages are compared to find out the transfer parts affected by mother tongue in the two interlanguages and the parts closer to Mandarin and summarize the respective characteristics of the interlanguages. Communicative interlanguage is used for communication, easy to learn but irregular, providing some help but significant interference in learning Mandarin; teaching interlanguage is regular but difficult to learn. The paper analyzes both interlanguages’ merits and interference in learning Mandarin and raises a new model of Chinese teaching which emphasizes interaction between the two interlanguages. Targeting the status-quo of Chinese acquisition by Hani students in Yayi Township, this paper offers corresponding advice on schools, teachers and teaching models in a bid to improve Chinese teaching in local areas.