A Study Of Errors In English Writings By Tibetan High School Students In Tibet Autonomous Region

In recent years, with the social progress and economic development, there are increasing trilinguals or so called three language learners. The cross-linguistic influence in Third Language Learning, as a result, draws more and more concern from linguists and language researchers. However, few studies have been conducted on language transfer among Chinese, Tibetan, and English. This situation is even worse in Tibet Autonomous Region due to various reasons like geographical position, economic condition and underdeveloped educational status. Therefore, very few researches has been done in the aspect of English teaching and learning in this Region, and researches concerning errors in Tibetan high school students’ English writing are much fewer. To make a change to the present situation, the author launches a study about errors in Tibetan high school students’ English writing in Lhasa, the biggest habitant of Tibetan minorities as well as the capital city of Tibet. The author conducts this study under an typical authentic linguistic environment of three languages, of which Tibetan, Chinese and English are coexisted, it aims to dig out the features and underlying interlingual causes of error in Tibetan students’ English writing, so as to provide a deep view on errors made by Tibetan students in their English writing and offer some pedagogical implications for High school English teaching in Tibet Autonomous Region.Taking Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Language Transfer as the theoretical framework, and under a particular trilingual environment(Tibetan, Chinese and English) in Tibet, the present study proposes to give answers to the following two questions:(1) What errors do Tibetan students make in their English writing?(2) Do the Tibetan students’ L1 and L2 influence their English writing? 164 Grade Three high school Tibetan students from Lhasa Middle School are selected as subjects. By description, collection, classification and evaluation of errors detected in the English writing samples from the subjects, the author discusses and analyzes types of errors and percentage of each type. Based on the results of this procedure, under the guidance of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, and information gained from individual interview, each type of errors is further assessed and explained, so as to probe the issue that whether Tibetan students’ L1 and L2 influence their English writing and which language exerts greater influence.Some findings are obtained through the data analysis. First, there are in general 14 types of errors committed by Tibetan students in their English writing, which can be grouped into two major categories: morphological errors and syntactic errors; second, Tibetan language and Chinese language do influence Tibetan high school students during their English writing process and their L2(Chinese) exerts greater influence as compared with their L1(Tibetan).