Transfer Sources Of Uyghur Students’ English Acquisition

Since the 1980 s,the study of TLA(Third Language Acquisition)has gradually separated from the researches of SLA(Second Language Acquisition),becoming an independent field.Researchers abroad have studied a great number of transfer phenomena,including transfer directions in different linguistic levels,factors that influence transfer,etc.In China,the studies of third language acquisition have started to be noticed,and have gradually become a trend.In fact,some articles on the research of third language acquisition among Uyghur students,Miao students,Mongolian students and Zhuang students have been published.Nonetheless,the results of many studies show that the sources of transfer among three languages that cause errors and mistakes,as well as the function of psycho-typology as a factor that influences transfer remain controversial.This study takes Uyghur students who studies English as their third language as the objects,trying to answer the following questions:(1)When Uyghur students are in the process of English(L3)acquisition,which language is the source to cause linguistic aspects(especially phonological and syntactic)transfer,(L1)Uyghur or(L2)Chinese?(2)What is Uyghur students’ perception of psycho-typology between L1/L2 and L3? Does learner’s perception of psycho-typology actually influence cross-linguistic transfer in the process of L3 acquisition?This study contrasts the English errors and mistakes made in compositions written by Uyghur and Han learners who are all high school students in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.Uyghur students who are equally proficient in both L1 and L2 are arranged as the experiment group,while Han students who have similar Chinese proficiency to Uyghur students are considered as the controlled group.Questionnaires are designed and distributed into these two groups of students to gather data for data analysis,to identify the source of errors,and to explore the relationship between psycho-typology and language transfer.Afterwards,participants are assigned with a composition to write within the allotted time.After their writing is completed,their work is inputted to the computer.Two corpora are set up based on the participants’ compositions,being named asthe composition corpus of Uyghur students(ULEC,4,527 words)and the composition corpus of Han Chinese students(HLEC,7303 words),respectively.The two composition corpora are annotated according to the principles of annotation of the Chinese learners English corpus(CLEC).Subsequently,Antconc 3.4.1 is adopted to retrieve the data,and then Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator is utilized to check the significance of deviation and to find out whether there is any difference of English errors made by the two groups of subjects.The accompanying questionnaire and the error analysis show that(1)most of the Uyghur students believe L3(English)is closer to L1(Uyghur)than to L2(Chinese),which is inconsistent with the actual typological distance among the three languages;(2)The negative transfer from L1 to L3 upon word-spelling is clear;(3)Both of L2(Chinese)and L1 have negative transfer on different aspects of L3 grammatical acquisition,yet from the holistic perspective,L1 has a greater impact than L2.Since the proficiency of L1 and L2 and the recency for utilizing L1 and L2,which are the main factors that influence transfer,are approximately identical,Uyghur students’ closer psycho-typology between L1 and L3 may explain why L1 has a greater impact than L2 on L3 acquisition.