The Influence Of Tibetan And Chinese Proficiency On Tibetan College Students’ Acquisition Of English Grammar

Third language acquisition study is relatively new in the area of applied linguistics and it has both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic foundations. In recent decades, more and more language learners have acquired three or even more languages because of the development of the society, economy and the increase of cross-culture communication. The study of Third Language Acquisition (TLA) and its cross-linguistic influence have aroused more and more scholars’ concern at home and abroad. However, fewer studies in China have been done on grammatical structures in TLA among Tibetan, Chinese and English.The research purpose of the present study is to investigate the influences of Tibetan college students’ first language (L1 which is Tibetan) level and second language level (L2 which is Chinese) on the third language (L3 which is English) grammar acquisition and find out the dominant language which result in Tibetan college students’anomalous L3 grammar structure as well as the language which influences their L3 acquisition more. Thus, through conducting an empirical study, this thesis explores the influence of the different proficiency level of L1 and L2 on Tibetan college students’acquisition of L3 grammar and the respective degree of influence of L1 and L2 on their L3 grammar production. The subjects of the study are 70 L1-Tibetan, L2-Chinese and L3-English freshmen at Tibet University. The present study undergoes two phases. In the first phase, the subjects are asked to fill out a language background questionnaire and take a Tibetan-English and Chinese-English translation test which contains 10 sentences of 5 frequently used grammatical structures. The second phase includes the data analysis of the 70 questionnaires, analysis of the translation by the subjects based on the theory of Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA) and Transfer Analysis (TA) and partial correlation study of different L1/L2 proficiency levels and L3 grammar acquisition.The analysis results of the present study suggest three major findings:First, as far as Tibetan college students learning English as L3 are concerned, their output of English grammar indicates that these Tibetan college students’English grammar acquisition is mainly influenced by the structures of L2 and L1 has only a weak negative effect on it. Second, the subjects’level of L1 proficiency of both Group 1 (with higher level of L1) and Group 2 (with lower level of L1) have no influence on their L3 grammar acquisition level. And students with relatively higher level of L2 proficiency of both Group 3 (with higher level of L2) and Group 4 (with lower level of L2) can perform correspondingly better in terms of English grammar production and those who have relatively lower one perform correspondingly worse in each group. Third, the dominant language resulting in the production of anomalous or wrong English structures by the Tibetan college students is L2, i.e., L2 is the major source of transfer in their L3 grammar acquisition.As a conclusion, the study emphasizes that English is a third language for Tibetan college students, which is different from many Han nationality students’acquisition of English as a second language. When studying Tibetan college students’English acquisition, we should take into consideration the different influences of L1 and L2, that is, whether they are positive or negative. Thereby, any decision or policy on Tibetan college students’ L3 learning in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) should be based on their TLA characteristics and the cross-linguistic influence involved in it. Besides, Tibetan college English teachers in TAR should enhance the positive transfer from L1 and L2 to L3 in the process of teaching and reduce the negative one to help Tibetan college students make progress in English learning.