A Study Of The Influence Of Chinese And Mongolian Upon Mongolian High School Students’ Learning Of English Relative Clause

Trilingual teaching has become more and more popular and important in minority areas of China. In order to improve students’ academic achievements, almost all minority schools have set not only the course of Putonghua but also add English as minority students’ compulsory course. Though tremendous achievements on minority students’ second language acquisition have been made by Chinese researchers,there are still few empirical studies that are specifically aimed at investigating Mongolian students’ English learning. Therefore, this study represents an attempt along this direction. It is intended to explore the main problems Mongolian students meet in English relative clause learning, with special attention given to the influence of Chinese and Mongolian upon English relative clause learning.In reference to the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis and theories of third language acquisition, the present study, first of all, describes the errors Mongolian students commit. And then it tries to explore the influence of L1(Mongolian) and L2(Chinese) upon their learning. More specially, this thesis is intended to addresses the following questions:1. What kind of errors do Mongolian students commit frequently in their English relative clause learning?2. To what extent are the errors Mongolian students commit related to Mongolian or Chinese?90 Mongolian students participated the present study. They were in Grade Two from Mongolian High School in Alukeerqinqi. In order to elicit the data, the participants were required to complete three tasks: a translation task, a sentence combination task and a sentence making task.The results show that the main errors that the Mongolian students committed are the misuse of relative pronouns or adverbs, misuse of the word order and the transposing of the main clause and relative clause.According to the statistics analysis, the author finds that the errors which caused by the interference of Mongolian is far fewer than the errors caused by Chinese influence or the misuse of relatives. That is to say,the English sentences the Mongolian students translated from Mongolian are rare related to Mongolian.Though there were a half of Mongolian sentences in the translation task, the errors the Mongolian students committed are still highly correlated to Chinese but not Mongolian. That is to say, Chinese has much more influence on the Mongolian students’ relative clause learning than Mongolian does.The thesis includes six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the research background, purposeand significance. Chapter Two is the literature review of previous studies upon third language acquisition and the relative clauses contrast between Mongolian and Chinese, Chinese and English, and Mongolian and English. Chapter Three discusses the theoretical framework of the present study with reference to the theories of third language acquisition and the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. Chapter Four describes the research design. Chapter Five reports on the results of the study and discusses the findings obtained in relation to the previous studies. Chapter Six is the conclusion of the present study.