A Study On Cross–Linguistic Influence Of Mongolian Students’ Chinese Proficiency On English Writing

China is a multi-nationality country consisting of56nationalities, among which Han nationality is the largestgroup. The other55nationalities are called minority nationalities which account for8%of the whole population.The distribution of minority nationalities covers a large part of the whole country. Due to geographical andhistorical factors, minority regions have legged behind other regions in China. With the importance of Englishbeing prominent, enough attention should be paid to the English teaching and learning in minority regions. Amongthe EFL and ESL learners, Mongolian English learners in Inner Mongolia are a special group with unique features.They have their own language---Mongolian, in both spoken and written forms, in the process of learning theirmother tongue, they are required to learn their second language—Chinese. Although, some researchers have carriedout some investigations into this unique group, the research on the role of Chinese as the medium in the process ofMongolian students’ third language learning especially in the English writing is rare.This study is based on the theories of TLA, CA, EA and Language Transfer, and it aims to probe into the roleof L2(here refers to Chinese) as the medium in the process of Mongolian students’ L3(here refers to English)writing. First of all, it starts with data collection from the participants’ language proficiency tests (including L2—Chinese and L3—English), English writings and questionnaires. The participants are80senior high schoolstudents in Alashan, Inner Mongolia. Their final papers of English and Chinese in the first half of2011are taken asthe language proficiency test tools. The author collects the results as the basic data and takes SPSS13.0software todo the descriptieve statistics and paired samples T-test for the participants’ Chinese proficiency and Englishproficiency, do the correlation analysis for Chineses proficiency and English proficiency, Chinese proficiency andEnglish writing proficiency, Chinese writing proficiency and English writing proficiency. Secondly, the part ofEnglish writing of English proficiency test is listed separately for error analysis. After confirmation andclassification, statistical errors of each variable and its share of the relevant percentagte are done. Finally, the authorconducts a questionnaire survey and interviews to complement the description of the study. This research adopts ahybrid design of quantitative and qualitative analysis, in order to answer the following questions:(1) Is therecorrelation between the L2proficiency and the L3proficiency of Mongolian students?(2) Is there correlationbetween the L2proficiency and the L3writing proficiency of Mongolian students?(3) If there is correlationbetween the L2proficiency and the L3writing proficiency, what differences are there between the high L2proficiency and the low L2proficiency of Mongolian students in the aspect of writing error types?After the data analysis, it is found that:(1) Mongolian students’ Chinese proficiency and English proficiency is positively correlated.(2) Mongolian students’ Chinese proficiency and English writing proficiency is positivelycorrelated.(3) The interlingua errors caused by interference from Chinese made by the participants in low Chineseproficiency group are significantly more than those in high Chinese proficiency group. It is concluded that thetransfer takes place from the seconed lanuage Chinese to the third language English writing, and the higher theChinese proficiency the students have, the less Chinese negative transfer they have in their English writing. Uponthese, the author gives suggestions to the teaching and learning of minority learners:(1) try to improve the minoritystudents’ Chinese proficiency, especially their Chinese writing, so that, the positive transfer can take place betweentheir second language and third language.(2) by improving the minority students’ third language itself to improvetheir third language’s proficiency.(3) English, Chinese, Mongolian analysis is great significance in Englishteaching of Mongolian students. Base on the theories of Language Transfer and CA, given the many shared featuresbetween Chinese and English and the degree to which they are linguistically related, the Mongolian learners couldmake good use of positive transfers to facilitate the acquisition of L3.(4) Strengthen the use of error analysis in theteaching of English writing can reduce the impact of Chinese negative transfer.There are6chapters in this paper: Chapter one presents the background of the research and its purpose,emphasizes the unique trilingual phenomenon of Mongolian students in Inner Mongolia, as well as the significanceof this study, including theoretical significance and practical significance; Chapter two provides a literature review,first a review of TLA studies, which included the studies on it abroad and in China is given. Then take a review ofCLI studies, and a few studies on this factor of minority students in china are particularly mentioned. Lastly,empirical studies on factors affecting L3writing are talked about; Chapter three gives the theoretical framework ofthis study. There are4items in this section.: theories of third language acquisition; language transfer theory; theContrastive Analysis Hypothesis and error analysis theory; Chapter four is research design. First, a general surveywas given. Then, the research questions, the participants, the instruments are put forward; Chapter five gives thedata analysis and results; Chapter six is centered on conclusion of the present study.