A Study of Native Chinese Speakers Learning Indo-european Languages: The Case of English and Russian

Abstract

Language proximity can have different degrees of influence on trilingual acquisition. For example, Japanese has a strong influence on Chinese, while English has a strong influence on Russian. This study used interviews and corpus analysis to examine learners with different levels of English as a second foreign language and Russian as a third foreign language. It was found that when native Chinese speakers learn a language belonging to the Indo-European family, the influence of English on Russian learning is greater than that of native Chinese, and the specific influence of English will be different at different stages. Based on the study some suggestions are also made for trilingual teaching. Considering that the majority of Chinese language learners today have a certain level of proficiency of English, it is significant to conduct the research of L3 learners who is native Chinese and whose L2 is English. Through interviewing the subjects and analysing their compositions, the researchers find that English as L2 both facilitates and hinders L3 acquisition. In particular, intermediate L3 learners are most likely to be influenced by L2, and conversely, advanced L3 learners are rarely influenced by their L2 English. L3 acquisition is more likely to be influenced by L2 when L3 and L2 are in a closer linguistic distance than L3 and L1. This study contributes to multilingual acquisition research and provides effective suggestions for multilingual teaching strategy.