A Study On Xinjiang Preschool Teachers’ Chinese Language In The Context Of Interaction With Uyghur Children

In the past few decades, China government paid great attention on the minority preschool children second language education. Xinjiang preschool bilingual education has already been a part of the national development plan. However, the activities implemented in the current practice of bilingual education in Xinjiang does not meet the characteristics of young children, as well as there are problems of bilingual teachers, such as teacher amount shortages, their low levels of Chinese language and teaching ability. Although lots researchers have made countermeasures, but most of these proposed measures are lack of strong evidence on theory and empirical research.This study is based on the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), aims to explore the characters of Xinjiang preschool teachers’Chinese language input and its effect on Uyghur children Chinese language development. In this study, we choose totaling25teachers as sample, record their interactions with80Uyghur pre-school children, aged from3-6, try to explore their Chinese lexicon, syntax and communicative acts, analysis their Chinese language level and reveal the relationship between the language of the teacher and children.The study on teachers lexicon output shows that from the angle of the total amount of word frequency and word type, whatever the Uygur preschool ages are, the teachers language output shows no significant differences. On the type and amount of word frequency, teachers output is always higher than that of the children. As children age group becomes older, the word type and word frequency differences between teachers and students are diminishing. Studies have shown that the longer the children in the kindergarten, the larger their total vocabulary amount; the higher level the teachers words amount, the larger the total number of children words type. Teacher vocabulary ability significantly influences the development of children’s vocabulary.The study on teachers syntactic output reveals that with the growth of the age of the children, the teachers use longer sentences, changes in the length of the turning point occurred mainly in the children groups up5and below4. Teachers’MLU is closely related to that of Uyghur children. In the overall, the longer the sentence the teachers use, the more it can promote the development of children’s Chinese Syntactic ability. There are syntax error exists in the teachers’sentences. Syntax error types of the teachers to a large extent affect the types of syntax errors of children. Both error types have the same characteristics. No matter in teacher or student language, the most common four types error are:missing components, improper word order, a variety of errors co-occurrence and false composition.The study on teachers’communicative acts found that Teachers’speech participation is decreasing as the children’s age increase. On interchange type, speech act type and pragmatic flexibility, teachers’language shows similarities and differences. There are types that use with high frequency. Through correlation analysis on the pragmatic between teachers and children, we found that the level of participation of teachers can significantly predict that of the children. By examining the most common used pragmatic flexibility types of both teachers and Uyghur children, we found to a large extent teachers’pragmatic affect the children’s pragmatic flexibility.The above three parts of research outline the basic characters of Xinjiang preschool teacher Chinese language. The study confirms the Chinese output of teachers directly influences the Chinese language development of Uyghur children. We find the major problems and difficulties faced by today Xinjiang preschool bilingual education lie in the teachers’lack of Chinese language proficiency, their limited capacity in language teaching and the lower quality of teaching interaction. Thus three suggestions are proposed here:to improve the teachers’language abilities, to promote the teachers’language teaching ability, and to create a more open Chinese interactive environmental for Uyghur children.The study is based on an empirical research with a large sample, provides scientific and reliable evidence to improve the problems in Xinjiang Preschool Bilingual Education, so as to really improve the quality of Chinese education for those minorities children. The study focuses on teachers’language and its impact on the minority children Chinese language acquisition. The findings enrich the study on the second language acquisition in China. The use of computer analysis method of corpus and CHILDES (the Child Language Data Exchange System) is also a significant breakthrough in the relative studies.