Cross-linguistic Influence In Mongolian Students' English Word Order Acquisition

Nowadays, English has become worldwide and intemational communicative language. There has laid more and more importance to the study of English in China, so its meaning has already gone beyond the range of a foreign language. In allusion to Chinese minority, in the process of English learning, there are cross-linguistic influence from both first language and second language, and the difficulty of learning is much bigger than the Han nationality. Meanwhile, Mongolian-Chinese students can also be affected by the languages of Mongolian and Chinese, so there are dual-language transfers in the Mongolian students'English learning.The paper starts with the English learners of Mongolian students, and the keystone of the paper is negative transfer of word orders which is from Mongolian and Chinese. Afterwards, using the theories of Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis, discuss the negative effect which is stemmed from Chinese and Mongolian in detail.This paper is made up of four parts. Part one is to give a brief introduction of the research background, and explain the different degrees of bilingual levels of Mongolian and Chinese in Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. Furthermore, it introduces the situation of English (as L3 for Mongolian students) teaching in Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. Part two is the introductions of the theories, serving as the theoretical base for part three. Part three is the most important and significant part. In this section, the writer tries to find out the word order errors of English in the participants' free compositions, then describes and analyzes them in detail by contrasting the structures of three languages:Mongolian, Chinese, and English in order to explain the causes of such errors made by the participants in their L3 acquisition (English). Part four serves as the conclusion of the whole paper, pointing out the shortcomings of this paper and the direction for further research.According to the analysis of the word order errors found in the participants' free writings in English, it can come to the following conclusions:(1) When the learners have not enough knowledge of English word orders, they tend to be in virtue of the structures of the languages learned before, and in this paper, Chinese and Mongolian for the Mongolian-English learners.(2) In this section, we have concluded five types of errors of English word orders due to language interference:the pre-modifiers used as post modifiers, errors of misplacement of single adverbials, errors of misplacement of multiple adverbials, errors of misplacement of double objects, and errors of inversion of the object and predicate. Each type of errors of word orders has more or less influenced by Mongolian and/or Chinese, and this phenomenon interprets the fact that L3 acquisition is much more complicated than that of L2.However, such conclusion above is only the speculation of the author, and it needs more careful research and further study.