A Study Of The Influence Of Tibetan High-School Students' Chinese Proficiency On Their English Writings

With the development of economic globalization,more and more people begin to learn a third language.In addition to college students majoring in foreign languages,high-school students in ethnic minority regions of China will also need to learn a third language.While a large amount of cross-linguistic influence studies mainly focused on native language effect towards additional languages,much less research has addressed the influence between multilinguals' two or more additional languages.Among those studies addressing L2 effect towards L3,most of them examined two languages that are typologically similar,sparing a large space for the investigation of the effect between typologically distinct L2 and L3 of multilinguals.The present study aims to investigate the influence of L2 proficiency on L3 writing competence of Tibetan-Chinese-English multilinguals.It may contribute to the theoretical framework of third language acquisition for multilinguals with typologically distinct L2 and L3,and shed light on English teaching methodology and strategy for students,teachers and policy makers in minority regions of China.In the present study,the influence of L2 proficiency on L3 writing competence is investigated from qualitative and quantitative aspects.According to Bardel and Falk's L2 status factor hypothesis,L2 can frequently serve as a predominant transfer source to L3 acquisition.It is therefore raised in the present study that whether or not multilinguals with higher L2 proficiency are prone to write better in L3? On the other hand,from the quantitative aspect,the present study scrutinizes written errors that are made in the L3 writings and compares the occurring frequency of each error type between high and low L2 proficiency.Consequently,another research question is naturally raised: whether or not the occurring frequencies are significantly different for all the error types,or just for some specific errors?To tackle those two research questions,223 Tibetan high-school students of Grade 2 in a Tibetan autonomous region of western China were recruited as volunteer trilingual participants in the present study.Their Chinese(as L2)proficiency was first surveyed and assessed by filling out questionnaires and 7-scale self-assessments.Afterwards,they were asked to complete an English(as L3)writing task with a defined theme in half an hour,and their written texts were collected for further analysis to evaluate their L3 writing competence.The collected writing samples were carefully transcribed,independently graded,and thoroughly analyzed.The correlation coefficient between L2 proficiency and L3 writing competence was computed by means of SPSS 23.For the error analysis,all the written errors made by the participants were classified as 16 error types,which were further grouped into morphological,lexical,and syntactic categories.With the help of NVivo 10,all the occurring errors were coded and counted,based on which the significance of error frequency difference between high-L2-proficient and low-L2-proficient participants was tested.It is found by the present study that L2 proficiency plays a significant role in L3 writing competence.The correlation coefficient is 0.292 with a p-value of 0.002 for high L1 proficiency,and 0.210 with a p-value of 0.035 for low L1 proficiency.That is to say,a highL2-proficient participant,regardless of L1 proficiency,will tend to write better in L3 and achieve a higher score than a low-L2-proficient participant.Furthermore,by the error analysis,it is shown that among all the error types,significant differences of L3 error frequencies exhibit only in capitalization,tense/aspect,omission of sentence elements,and word order between high-L2-proficient and low-L2-proficient participants.The corresponding p-values for those types of errors are 0.045,0.034,0.032,and 0.048,respectively.It is also worth noting that the linguistic transfer effect of L2 towards L3 can be either positive or negative,as high-L2-proficient participants usually make fewer errors in capitalization and omission of sentence elements,whereas they frequently create more errors in tense/aspect and word order.With the present study,two major conclusions can be drawn.On the one hand,in support of the L2 status factor hypothesis,L2 proficiency indeed has certain positive influence on L3 writing competence.On the other hand,the L3 error frequencies in general show a significant difference between high and low L2 proficiency.However,a close examination of each of the error types indicates that most of them fail to exhibit significant differences between high and low L2 proficiency(12 out of 16).This result can somehow be explained by Cummins' threshold hypothesis.The present study also offers two suggestions regarding English teaching methodology and strategy in Tibetan minority regions of China.Due to the fact that positive effect of L2 towards L3 prevalently exists,English teachers in those regions should pay more attention to the Chinese learning of high-school students in parallel to English learning so as to form a synergy of the both.Moreover,the policy makers for those regions should reflect accordingly to help improve the trilingual environment in a long-term perspective way.