Herdina and Jessner(2002) put it that third language acquisition(TLA) or plurilingual acquisition in the course of research。 The ability of language learners is a dynamic and complex system interacting with language acquisition variables with the passage of time。 It is an incontrovertible fact that language learners will be under the impact of L1 and L2 during the process of third language acquisition。 English teaching of  Xinjiang minority belongs to trilingual education。 Teachers find it much more intricate than they expected that the influence have on L1-L2-L3 when teaching Uyghur-native students English。 Therefore, from the view of language transfer and cognitive structure, conducting an active exploration of the features and rules in learning English, under the trilingual environment, is of great importance in enhancing the overall quality of ethnic minorities in the long term。

By investigating the difficulties that Uygur-native students get across in the process of learning English through a questionnaire, the author analyzes the errors caused by Uighur among those Uygur-native students。 Suggestions are offered to teachers to go over the differences among the three languages in teaching to make students avoid the negative transfer from Mandarin Chinese and Uygur languages so as to improve the overall quality of English learning of Uygur-native students。论文网

2。 Literature Review

Third language acquisition(TLA) is a relatively new area of study, which derives its origin from transfer theory in 1980s, based on the research of bilingualism and the SLA。 It has both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic foundation。 

The followings are several different situations that bilinguals have when they learn L3 shown by researches abroad。 First, in bilingual communities with local languages, English is regarded as the third language to teach in the bilingual teaching outline, such as Frisian, Basque language, Catalan and Brittania。 Second, children who speak ethnic minority languages, receive education in immersion teaching plan(eg。 Canada)。 Finally, children who speak ethnic minority languages attend to the general teaching plan containing foreign language teaching。

In our country, works about studying third language acquisition(TLA) are also very limited。 Professor Yuan Yichuan lived in Yunnan province for a long time where ethnic minorities settle in。 He studied motivations for English learning from ethnic minority students in the southwest and has published an article concerning TLA Attitude and Motivation for English learning of Ethnic minority Students in Yunnan, China(Yuan Yichuan 3)。 China’s foreign language core journal Foreign and Their Teaching has introduced a new column named Research on Third Language Acquisition, which indicates the beginning of our country with independent academic realm of TLA。 

Above all, the research on third language acquisition in China is far from being developed, the focus of which has predominantly been on Cross Language influence。 The levels of the study are phoneme, vocabulary and syntax, in which trilingual combinations involved are Tibetan-Chinese-English, Uyghur-Chinese-English, the Qiangic language- Chinese-English, the Miao language-Chinese-English, Chinese-English-Russian, Chinese-English-France, Chinese-English-German, and Chinese-English-Japanese,etc。 Current correlative researches on language transfer on Uyghur-native students from the perspective of TLA are not so many, so this paper tries to do some research on this topic。

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3。 The Research Background

The quality of education in Xinjiang has gradually increased with the constant exploration and practice these years。 However, compared with outback, there still exists a largish gap and insufficiency due to different history, economy and culture affairs。

 As we all know, Xinjiang is a multi-ethnic, multilingual and multicultural area, in which the English teaching and learning obviously differs from that in inland。 Mandarin Chinese (L2) and Uyghur (L3) might become the obstacles in the process of learning English (L3) for Uyghur-native students, especially referring to the students who have learned Mandarin Chinese for more than five years。