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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study
China, as a country consisting of 56 nationalities including 55 minorities, hasover 80 languages of which 30 that has both spoken and written forms are used bythese minority groups. Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is a place in China whereMongolian people are largely populated. Normally speaking, the order of languageacquisition for Mongolian students at school is Mongolian, Chinese, and then English,which belongs to Altaic family, Sino-Tibetan family and Indo-European familyrespectively. Besides, in most of the cases, they are taught in a trilingual mode,namely, Mongolian-Chinese-English are switched and interacted, but Mongolian andChinese are more frequently used in teaching, especially Chinese.Since the 1980s, the policy of bilingual Education began to be carried out inminority areas of China. Ombaser (2004) put forward that almost all localgovernments in minority autonomous regions had adopted it from the 1980s to 1990s.In 1995, minority groups like the Mongolian, Tibetan, Korean, Uygur and Zhuangtook both their minority languages and Mandarin as teaching languages at school.Worldwide, the rapid development of globalization and frequent contact amongdifferent languages lead to the appearance of the multilingual phenomenon.Furthermore, the implementation of the reform and opening up policy makes Englishincreasingly become an important language in the communication. Consequently,Mandarin and minority languages cannot satisfy developmental needs of differentaspects of minority areas any more. Therefore, Chinese Ministry of Educationdetermined to spread the teaching of foreign language in those areas in 2001 and gaveEnglish a higher priority in the curriculum reform of elementary education at thebeginning of the 21stcentury. This decision has paved a way for trilingual education inprimary and middle schools. In order to develop the trilingual education, Chineseresearchers have made great contributions by carrying out researches in the field of third language acquisition. In spite of these remarkable progresses, there are stillmany problems that remain to be solved. As mentioned above, China has 56nationalities involving 55 minorities, each of which has their own distinct culture andcustom. Accordingly, any kind of research of a certain minority group cannot beadapted for circumstances of others directly, so it is necessary to conduct studies onthird language acquisition (TLA) of different minority groups according to theirdifferent national realities.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
Third language acquisition is an emerging research area that mainly focuses onsocial and psychological factors in trilingualism. In the last two decades, it hasreceived more and more attention from researchers abroad and at home, but thereexists many distinctions between them.First, studies on TLA abroad have been developing vigorously concerningvarious respects from different perspectives while studies on TLA at home arecomparatively insufficient in quantity and less efficient in quality. Second, incomparison with the time that the research on TLA started in foreign countries, Chinafirst studied it at the beginning of 21stcentury, which is far later. Third, as for researchsubjects, foreign scholars choose immigrants while Chinese scholars pay much oftheir attention on non-English major undergraduates and only a minority of studiesselect second for