The Empirical Research On Code-switching Among Trilingual High School Students:Mongolian,Chinese And English In English Writing

Listening,speaking,reading and writing are the fundamental ability for the learners in English language studying.However,English writing is a process of comprehensive and creative output.It consists of code-switching,thinking and language output.Moreover,code-switching is very common in bilingual or trilingual learners.However,in China,the researches pay more attention to bilinguals' code-switching but less attention to trilingual or multilinguals' code-switching,especially among Mongolian,Chinese and English.In addition,they just focus on code-switching in conversation or speech but not text creating in their third language.Therefore,in order to improve trilingual students' English writing ability and develop trilingual education,in this paper,the code-switching phenomenon in trilingual text creating process have been analyzed.Specifically,this study was conducted in a trilingual high school: Mongolian,Chinese and English,Inner Mongolia Autonomy Region and 30 trilingual students were involved.This paper employed concurrent think-aloud method,text analysis and interview to analyze the errors occurred in trilingual students' composition and the code-switching patterns as they composed a story in English based on a series of wordless picture.The study also gave special attention to the role of the participants' language in the composition process and investigated text-creating strategies of trilingual students in English,their third language.Then,relevant statistics and text examples were analyzed and summarized.At the end of the paper,it will provide some suggestions on developing trilingual students' English writing ability.Study findings are as follows,the errors are very common in trilingual students' composition,especially grammatical and syntax errors;While composing the target language text,the code-switching phenomenon is very common and seven possible patterns will be occurred.The languages—Mongolian,Chinese and English used by trilinguals have distinct roles in the process of tackling a composition task in a third-language text.Also,study participants use different text-creating strategies and codes as they composed a story in English.Finally,it appears to suggest that develop the positive effects of Mongolian and Chinese on the third language learning,help trilingual students get the text-creating strategies,enrich the English curriculum and activitiesto enlarge trilignual students' input and cultivate target language thinking gradually in the process of creating the target language content.