English Teaching In The Trilingual Dong-Chinese-English Environment

In the context of the economic globalization, English has become increasingly important and more widely used worldwide than ever before. However, in China’s ethnic minority regions, minority students’English level is generally low, which affects to a certain extent the political, economic and cultural construction in minority regions. As a member of minority,(the author is a member of Dong ethnic group and has been teaching English for7years.) the author has experienced the difficult and uneven English learning process. Therefore, it is highly necessary to conduct relevant research on the learning and teaching of English involving three languages:Dong, Han and English.This study adopts the methods of observation, interview and questionnaire. Through contrastive analysis of Dong and English in terms of phonetics and syntactics, it draws the conclusion that Dong language would cause both positive and negative transfers for English learning. Through the interviews and questionnaires in Tongle junior middle school (in Dong area), the author realizes that the majority of the Dong middle school students tend to use their native Dong language to assist the comprehension of English. In fact, the students who were low in Chinese language proficiency would like to use Dong in understanding the new language input. Meanwhile, with the ingrained Dong language and negative transfers, the Dong middle school students may often confuse Dong, Chinese and English languages, and form a complex network learning mechanism. However, for the minority students, mother tongue is the most suitable language of instruction. But in most ethnic areas of China, language teaching usually uses the traditional bilingual instructional mode of English--Chinese. For ethnic students, English learning and Chinese learning are both second language learning. Thus, the use of Chinese as the medium language of instruction in English classes increases the difficulty in English learning for ethnic students. This thesis suggests that in the trilingual English-Dong-Chinese teaching environment, the use of Dong language as one of medium language of instructions will have positive effect on English learning. Therefore, it is worth to try to build this trilingual teaching mechanism to improve the English learning of Dong students.