A Study On Language Transfer In English Writing Under Third Language Acquisition Theory-Based On Investigating Korean Nationality Students In Junior High Schools

China is a united multi-ethnic and multilingual country with fifty-six nationalities, that is, Han and the other fifty-five ethnic groups. Education of ethnic groups is an important part of the education of the whole country, and what’s more, foreign language education of ethnic groups is significant and crucial in the education of ethnic groups. Nowadays, English learning of ethnic group students becomes focus of attention and the various problems that they face and the difficulties they meet during the process of learning English are studied.According to the Third Language Acquisition, mother tongue is their minority language and the second language is Chinese for most minority students in China. The third language is foreign language(generally English). Therefore, the process of learning English for a minority student is the acquisition of third language, which is more complicated than the process of learning English for a Han student(the acquisition of the second language). In the acquisition of third language, there are two kinds of transfer from two languages-mother tongue and the second language.This thesis selects the Third Language Acquisition and Language Transfer as the theoretical basis of this study. This thesis aims at finding out the main negative language transfer phenomena in the English writings of junior high school students in Korean nationality schools by analyzing compositions and then studying and discussing the solutions and suggestions for reducing the negative language transfer and for improving Korean nationality students’ English writing competence and integrated English competence.The participants are 419 students from three Korean nationality junior high schools in Shenyang. Study instruments involve questionnaire, English writing test and interview. The process of the thesis is composed of four steps: The first step is to analyze a large amount of literature relevant to this thesis. The second step is to do the questionnaire research.The third step is to collect students’ compositions and analyze all of them in details. The fourth step is to interview English teachers and then to discuss the solutions and suggestions for English teaching and learning of Korean nationality students in junior high schools.The whole process of the study is to give answers to the following three questions:(1)What are the main language transfer phenomena in Korean nationality junior high school students’ compositions?(2)What are the reasons for the main language transfer phenomena?(3)How can we reduce the negative effect of language transfer in the compositions by Korean nationality junior high school students?Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in this thesis. The analysis of questionnaire shows that students in Korean nationality junior high schools are aware of the influence from Chinese and Korean and the two languages both affect students’ learning of the third language to different extent. There are quite a few negative language transfer from Chinese and Korean in students’ compositions through the analysis of their compositions, such as verb tense, subject-verb agreement, plural nouns, etc. Interviews with English teachers help to obtain some suggestions for English learning in Korean nationality schools, for example, teachers should try to understand the theories of SLA and TLA; to encourage students to read more; to encourage students to edit by themselves, and so on.