Minority College Students Language Usage Survey

This thesis is arm at studying the language use condition of the ethnic college students with the sample from the Central University for Nationalities (CUN). The Language Use Condition is a complicated concept. Generally speaking, it refers to the knowledge and use of certain language group, including the level of the language capacity (listening, speaking, reading and writing (if they have)), the frequency, the scope and the occasion of their language use, the language attitude, etc.The language use condition in this thesis is mainly refer to the bilingual condition of the ethnic college students, including the proficient level, usage occasion, educated languages, etc. So far as we know, there are few researches concerning the language use of the ethnic college students, especially from the sociology and anthropology aspect. Knowing this condition can be helpful for the country and the college to understand the real condition of the language use of the ethnic college students, and it can be an important reference for the college to design its relevant courses.Questionnaires and interviews are used in this research. In the total of all the 11390 all-day undergraduates, excluding the Hui and the Man (The Hui has already shifted its language to Chinese, the same as most of the Man. Yet these two take up a high percentage of all the students: TheHui is the largest ethnic group in CUN, the Man is the second. Year 2005), the author sampled 420 ethnic students from 21 schools, 20 for each school. At the same time, the author electively interviewed 20 ethnic students. The tool used to analyze the data is SPSS.The result shows, as a whole, the ethnic college students have a strong Chinese language capacity, but their ethnic language is relatively weak, one out of four cannot use the ethnic language at all. The difference between the majors is great. The percentage of bilingual students who can use both Chinese and ethnic language effectively is low, it's less than 10%. From the residential aspect, we can see the great difference between the students from rural area and city. The students from rural area usually possess better ethnic language capacity. The same as the students live in a compact community. From the family aspect, the different type of the parents' marriage, the family language, whether live with the grand generation, can effect the language use of the ethnic college students; in the school, the teaching model, the teaching language, the language used between close friends also effects the language use of the ethnic college students, as well as the media factor. Generally speaking, the ethnic college students love their mother tongue deeply, and they also recognize the Chinese language, their language attitude is fairly open.The language use condition of the ethnic college students is determined by the ethnic relationship of China, which is "multielement inan integral whole". The trend of the language use of the ethnic college students is to draw close to the "integration", that is the Chinese language. The author suggests: the state should build different bilingual education model according to the real situation; the college should afford more courses to meet the need of the ethnic students to improve their language ability (including the ethnic language and Chinese), and the ethnic student himself should actively utilize all kinds of resources to improve his bilingual even multilingual ability.