A Study On Dual Negative Transfer Of Chinese And Korean In Korean Ethnic Group Students’ Acquisition Of English

English education in minority middle and high schools in China started in the1980s. Chinese minority students, in their process of learning English, are likely totransfer the features of both their mother tongue and Chinese into their interlanguage,so they may have more difficulty in learning English than Han students. For effectiveEnglish teaching of Chinese minority students, we must carry out research withminority students as the research subjects to find out effective pedagogy for theirspecial cases.This thesis intends to investigate the negative transfer of both Korean (mothertongue) and Chinese (second language) when Korean ethnic students learn English(third language), to find out the problems existent in the English education in KoreanChinese elementary and secondary schools, and to provide strategies to solve theproblems. The author collects132English compositions written by Korean Chinesemiddle school students, and analyzes the errors in these compositions, especially theinterlingual errors on syntactic level. The author also analyzes the students’questionnaire and teachers’ interview. From the analysis, the following findings canbe concluded: Korean Chinese students are affected by both Chinese and Koreanwhen learning English, with their mother tongue having more influence. Besides, theinterference of their mother tongue is more obvious at the beginning stage of theirEnglish learning. Through their effort and becoming familiar with the targetlanguage (English), their interlanguage errors reduce gradually.According to the analysis, the author finds some problems probably existent inthe trilingual education of Korean Chinese elementary and secondary schools. In theprocess of English teaching, due to the excessive focus on explaining the words andsentences, students’ other abilities are neglected, such as reading ability, reasoningability and emotional development. In addition, Korean Chinese students have tolearn three languages almost at the same time, which is a heavy burden for them. Also, the English teaching in Korean Chinese elementary and secondaryschools in Yanbian area is not carried out according to students’ individualdifferences, so a lot of Korean Chinese students are left behind in their Englishlearning. To solve these problems, training qualified trilingual teachers for minorityschools becomes an important and urgent task. Scientific research on trilingualeducation as the guidance is also a necessity to ensure that English education inminority schools can develop effectively.