An Impact Of Language Transfer On Syntactic Acquisition Of The Tibetan English Majors

Since the last60s, language transfer has become the research emphasis ofapplied linguistics, second language acquisition (SLA hereafter), language teaching,etc. Many theories like contrastive analysis (CA hereafter), error analysis (EAhereafter), markedness theory, multilanguage transfer have improved it greatly. All ofthose studies pay attention to the influence of the first language (L1hereafter) or otheracquired languages or second language (L2hereafter) on the acquisition of the targetlanguage, and have pushed the development of foreign language teaching and learningin the whole world.Up to now, most of the language transfer studies have taken Han students as thesubjects, and paid little attention to Tibetan students. Due to the special Tibetan-Chinese-English language mechanism, language transfer study about Tibetan studentsbecomes complicated. Studies show, both of Han students and Tibetan students havedifficulties in English learning, and the latter have more than the former, as they areaffected not only by Chinese, but also by Tibetan.This paper focuses on98Tibetan English majors in Tibetan NationalitiesInstitute from the grade of2009-2013. Firstly, the main English learning backgroundof the students is collected through questionnaire. Then, the main syntax errors intheir English compositions are analyzed to find out the reasons and resolutions. At last,the question of which language the students use as their thinking tool in their Englishwriting process is learned through individual interviewThis research tries to answer the following questions:(1) what are the main syntactic errors in Tibetan English majors Englishcompositions?(2) What are the function of Chinese and Tibetan in the syntactic errorsproduction?(3) What are the reasons for those errors? Based on the relative theories of language transfer, the paper analyzes the mainsyntactic errors in Tibetan English majors’ compositions through EA, and tries to findout the reasons through CA of Tibetan, Chinese and English. It aims to improveTibetan students’ English level, and the English teaching level in Tibetan.The paper includes five chapters. The first chapter introduces the researchbackground, questions and significance of this paper. The second chapter is literaturereview. It introduces the development of language transfer, and relative theories. Thethird chapter is research methodology. It includes subject and instruments introduction,and research questions and hypothesis. The fourth one is main findings anddiscussions. Based on the syntactic errors in chapter three, this chapter analyzes themain reasons through CA of Tibetan, Chinese and English. Chapter Five is conclusion.The suggestions for syntactic acquisition of Tibetan English majors are proposed, andlimitations of this research are put out for further discussion.In a word, this research focuses on the influence of the Tibetan-Chinese-Englishlanguage mechanism in Tibetan English majors’ English learning, and has applicationvalue in improving the English teaching of national minorities, especially Tibetan.