A Study On Attitudes Towards Trilingual Learning In Jinpo Minority District

Recently,trilingualism has become a research focus for many researchers at home and abroad(Hu,2007;Yuan,2007;Adamson & Feng,2009).It is based on the trilingual education,trilingual policy and motivation for trilingual learning.However,the comparative research on learning attitudes towards trilingualism among different schools in ethnic minority areas is still rare.The paper analyzes and compares the similarities and differences of learning attitudes towards trilingualism adopted by grade 8 Jingpo ethnic minority students respectively from county,town and village secondary middle schools,and thus to explore whether there are significant differences among them and what the possible reasons are.The present research mainly adopts questionnaires and depth interviews for data collection from Longchuan.The participants of questionnaires include 300 Jingpo ethnic minority students from 3 junior middle schools.18 Jingpo ethnic minority students,6 English teachers and 3 schoolmasters are randomly selected for interviews.SPSS 11.5 of computer software has been used to conduct the descriptive analysis and one-way samples T test.The research findings focus on three aspects: 1)Jingpo ethnic minority students’ learning attitudes towards trilingualism.The most positive trilingual learning attitude is from county middle school,then village middle school and town middle school.Among trilingualism,the learning attitudes towards Jingpo language are the most positive,then Chinese and English;2)English teachers’ attitudes towards trilingual learning.In terms of six English teachers’ positive attitudes towards trilingual learning,and Jingpo language could help them learn English because most of Jingpo phonetic letters are similar to the English alphabets.The proposal of utilizing ethnic minority students’ mother tongue to English instruction is welcome;3)Schoolmasters’ attitudes towards the implementation of trilingual education.Three interviewed schoolmasters are not familiar with trilingual education and practice in Yunnan ethnic minority areas.In recent years,they have no intentions to open trilingual classes in their schools and just passively wait for supports from governments.Three suggestions are put forward in this thesis: 1)Cultivate Jingpo student’s positive learning attitude towards trilingualism;2)Improve the teaching effectiveness of English teachers in minority areas;3)Strongly support the implementation of the trilingual education in minority areas.