A Corpus-Based Study on the Influence of Ethnic Language on Zhuang English Learners in China

Abstract: This study built a rare kind of interlanguage corpus of English compositions from middle school students of Zhuang ethnic group, exploring language transfer on English writing output of the students from their mother-tongue—Zhuang. Another interlanguage corpus is used as the reference corpus with English compositions by Chinese students of non-specific ethnic identity (but assumedly of Han majority) using Chinese as their mother tongue. Through comparison between the self-built Zhuang-Chinese-English learners ’ corpus and Chinese-English learners ’ one, this study found that not only are there distinctive differences between the spelling, negation, and auxiliary errors in English writing of Zhuang minority and Han majority students, but also mother-tongue transfer and training transfer have influence on Zhuang students ’ English output