Comparison Of English Errors Made By Junior Uyghur And Han Students On Compositions From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

English is regarded as the third language to learn solely in classroom for Uyghur students in Xinjiang Autonomous Region.As a major ethnic minority,Uyghur students began to learn native language Uyghur and second language Chinese when they were children,and then learn third language English at school.Their mother tongue Uyghur and second language Chinese will influence third language English acquisition for Uyghur students.As a language outputs,writing is an important part of foreign language learning especially for Uyghur students,English writing is one of the most difficult problems in listening,speaking,reading and writing.There are different types of errors in the English compositions for Uyghurs.Cross-linguistic Influence researches have conducted from Contrastive Analysis to Conceptual Transfer,the origin of Conceptual Transfer is from a weak version of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis---language influence thought.And it can be explained as way of one language thought influences another language thought and the effect of cross-linguistic may be positive or negative.There are many researches for second language acquisition by error analysis.This thesis is based on Contrastive Analysis,Error Analysis and Conceptual Transfer.The author makes a comparative study on the English writing errors of junior Uyghur and Han students.The object of this study is junior Uyghur and Han students who are from grade eight at No.18 junior high school in Yining and 130 valid samples are collected.Through the classification and description of statistics,the purpose is to solve three questions as followed:1.What are the types of errors made by junior Uyghur and Han students on their compositions? What about the distribution of errors?2.Is the Uyghur students' English learning mostly interfered by Uyghur or Chinese?3.From the perspective of conceptual transfer,what are the factors that affect English errors made by junior Uyghur students on their compositions?On the basic of above research:Errors can be divided into two categories: linguistic-based errors and source-based errors in this thesis.Linguistic-based errors include lexical errors,morphological errors,syntactic errors,syntactic errors have the largest proportion;source-based errors include interlingual errors and intralingual errors,interlingual errors have the largest proportion.Han students are affected by Chinese transfer,however Uyghur students are affected by Chinese transfer and Uighur language transfer in their English writing,but the influence of Chinese transfer is greater than Uyghur language transfer.From the perspective of Conceptual Transfer,combined with Jarvis' proposed compound conceptual representation system,the author shows the factors that affect English writing errors for junior Uyghur students: misuse of first language-based concepts in the production of third language;mis-construction of shared concepts;mis-construction of second language-based concepts.Finally,according to the characteristics of English errors from junior Uyghur students' writing,some implications will be put forward.