| As a multi-nationality country, there are56nationalities in China. Many nationalities have their own languages. They use both their own language and Chinese in their daily life. Because of historical and geographical issues, those people of minority nationalities who live in remote areas, their education levels lagged behind other areas in China, especially the language education. The language education in minority nationalities’areas are not only of low level, but also with a complex situation. Take Inner Mongolia as an example, the Mongolian students who take Mongolian as their first language, have three kind of language classes in school, including Mongolian class, Chinese class and English class. This study will focus on this kind of students’second language proficiency, which is Chinese, and how their Chinese capacity of some aspects influence their third language study, which is English.This thesis in base on theories of Third Language Acquisition, Multilingual Acquisition, Cross-linguistic Influence, Language Transfer, Language input and output, Language Cognitive, Motivation and related research results abroad and inside in these fields. The aims is to study the Mongolian students’Chinese capacity of all aspects, and how their Chinese influence their English study as intermediary language. First of all, the study took the sophomore Mongolian students in foreign language department of Chifeng University as participants. Hanban’s Chinese Proficiency Test HSK (level5) sample was taken as test tool, and the data collection included listening part, reading part, sentence writing part and short passage writing part. The data collection also included participants’ English final exam results of2nd semester,2012-2013school year. Then the author used SPSS version16.0to do the descriptive statistics and correlations analysis between Chinese proficiency test results and English final exam results. Secondly, the author had talk with the participants to survey their language learning motivations, psychological factors and social factors which could influence their English learning. Finally, based on related theories, discussions and analysis were made to answer the following questions:(1) The Mongolian students who suits such language acquisition model as Mongolian→Chinese→English, are there any correlations between their Chinese proficiency and English study?(2) Which aspect of Chinese proficiency of these student, including listening part, reading part, sentence writing part and short passage writing part, correlated to their English study especially?(3) What are the characteristics of all aspects of the participant’s Chinese proficiency?Preliminary conclusions could be revealed through data analysis:(1) The Mongolian students who suits such language acquisition model as Mongolian→Chinese→English, there are correlations between their Chinese proficiency and English study.(2) The results of short passage writing part of these student are correlated to their English study especially.(3) The characteristics of all aspects of the participant’s Chinese proficiency could be explain as follow:There are small gaps among all the participants of their listening and reading proficiency, but there are big gaps among the participants of their writing proficiency. The results could prove that the better the students’Chinese proficiency is, the better their English proficiency is. And as the students’second language, Chinese still plays the role of intermediary language in their English study. Both their Chinese and English are in characters of interlanguage. Base on these issues, the author suggested that:(1) the students should pay more attention to their Chinese as a second language;(2) the students should improve both of their English and Chinese proficiencies, and more, the proficiency of language cognition;(3) the students’second language and third language environment and motivations should be improved as positive elements for their language study. |
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