A Study On English Acquisition Of Mongolian Students In The MCE Teaching Model

Trilingual teaching—native language teaching, Chinese teaching and foreignlanguage teaching is a new language teaching model in minority-inhabited areas ofChina. In this distinctive model, minority students’ English learning is quite differentfrom that of the Han students. Due to the various minority languages, the trilingualteaching model for students from different minorities is varied. In this way, theirEnglish acquisition problems should be explored case by case. Tremendousachievements on minority students’ foreign language acquisition have been made byChinese researchers, in which, however, few empirical researches are specificallymade on Mongolian students. Based on Language Acquisition Theory, LanguageTransfer Theory, and Learning Motivation Theory, this study attempts to exploreMongolian students’ current English acquisition problems in theMongolian-Chinese-English (MCE) teaching model, and proposes to address thefollowing three research questions:1. What is the motivation for Mongolian students to learn English?2. How does language transfer take effects among Mongolian, Chinese andEnglish in Mongolian students’ English learning process?3. What influences Mongolian students’ English learning in the MCE teachingmodel?To answer the three questions,300students in Grade Two from ChifengMongolian Senior High School were invited to participate in the questionnaire survey,and then8students were randomly chosen to be interviewed on October22nd,2012.The statistics were input into the software SPSS20.0for statistical analysis after beingencoded. The research findings suggest that the strongest motivation for Mongolianmiddle school students to learn English is to find a good job in the future. As for thetrilingual language transfer, neither does Chinese affect the language transfer betweenMongolian and English (p<0.5) nor does Mongolian affect the language transfer between Chinese and English (p<0.5). Though both Mongolian and Chinese haveinfluences on Mongolian students’ English acquisition in the aspects of grammar,pronunciation and intonation, the negative transfer that Mongolian has on English ismuch stronger than Chinese does. The research findings also show that teachingmethods and textbooks affect Mongolian students’ English learning to a certain extent,since the current textbooks are not quite suitable for Mongolian students, andMongolian is their preference as the teaching language compared with Mandarin.This research is expected to be useful in presenting the difficulties that Mongolianstudents face in their English learning in the distinctive MCE teaching and learningenvironment to the teachers to better Mongolian students’ English performances. It isalso expected to be served as a reference for future researches in this field.