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Chinese adults’ learning Thai as a foreign language in informal contexts / Wang Dong Hui Zi

The objectives of this thesis are 1) to illustrate the influence of cross-linguistic similarities in multilingual acquisition and 2) to investigate the problems and limitations with informal third language (L3) acquisition, focusing on young adult Mandarin speakers whose L1 is Mandarin and L2 is Eng...

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Main Author: Wang, Dong Hui Zi
Format: Thesis
Published: 2014
Subjects:
P Philology. Linguistics
Online Access:http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5702/1/WANGDONGHUIZI(TGC090023).pdf
http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5702/
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spelling my.um.stud.57022015-07-28T05:11:13Z Chinese adults’ learning Thai as a foreign language in informal contexts / Wang Dong Hui Zi Wang, Dong Hui Zi P Philology. Linguistics The objectives of this thesis are 1) to illustrate the influence of cross-linguistic similarities in multilingual acquisition and 2) to investigate the problems and limitations with informal third language (L3) acquisition, focusing on young adult Mandarin speakers whose L1 is Mandarin and L2 is English and who acquire oral Thai as their L3 through informal learning in social interactions. The participants were Mandarin teachers who have acquired certain levels of Thai language while working in Thailand. In my study, I suggest that as both Thai and Mandarin are tonal languages that have similar sentence patterns, it is relatively easy for Mandarin speakers to acquire Thai. Using a survey and language proficiency tests, it is found that language distance affects the cross-linguistic influence in multi-linguals’ language acquisition. More specifically, when learners have knowledge of related languages that belong to the same language family (in this case, Sino-Tibetan), the background language (BL: Mandarin) that is closest to the target language (TL: Thai) will be a positive source for TL learning. In other words, cross-linguistic similarities can help learners to achieve the TL. 2014 Thesis NonPeerReviewed application/pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5702/1/WANGDONGHUIZI(TGC090023).pdf Wang, Dong Hui Zi (2014) Chinese adults’ learning Thai as a foreign language in informal contexts / Wang Dong Hui Zi. Masters thesis, University of Malaya. http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5702/
institution Universiti Malaya
building UM Library
collection Institutional Repository
continent Asia
country Malaysia
content_provider Universiti Malaya
content_source UM Student Repository
url_provider http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/
topic P Philology. Linguistics
spellingShingle P Philology. Linguistics
Wang, Dong Hui Zi
Chinese adults’ learning Thai as a foreign language in informal contexts / Wang Dong Hui Zi
description The objectives of this thesis are 1) to illustrate the influence of cross-linguistic similarities in multilingual acquisition and 2) to investigate the problems and limitations with informal third language (L3) acquisition, focusing on young adult Mandarin speakers whose L1 is Mandarin and L2 is English and who acquire oral Thai as their L3 through informal learning in social interactions. The participants were Mandarin teachers who have acquired certain levels of Thai language while working in Thailand. In my study, I suggest that as both Thai and Mandarin are tonal languages that have similar sentence patterns, it is relatively easy for Mandarin speakers to acquire Thai. Using a survey and language proficiency tests, it is found that language distance affects the cross-linguistic influence in multi-linguals’ language acquisition. More specifically, when learners have knowledge of related languages that belong to the same language family (in this case, Sino-Tibetan), the background language (BL: Mandarin) that is closest to the target language (TL: Thai) will be a positive source for TL learning. In other words, cross-linguistic similarities can help learners to achieve the TL.
format Thesis
author Wang, Dong Hui Zi
author_facet Wang, Dong Hui Zi
author_sort Wang, Dong Hui Zi
title Chinese adults’ learning Thai as a foreign language in informal contexts / Wang Dong Hui Zi
title_short Chinese adults’ learning Thai as a foreign language in informal contexts / Wang Dong Hui Zi
title_full Chinese adults’ learning Thai as a foreign language in informal contexts / Wang Dong Hui Zi
title_fullStr Chinese adults’ learning Thai as a foreign language in informal contexts / Wang Dong Hui Zi
title_full_unstemmed Chinese adults’ learning Thai as a foreign language in informal contexts / Wang Dong Hui Zi
title_sort chinese adults’ learning thai as a foreign language in informal contexts / wang dong hui zi
publishDate 2014
url http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5702/1/WANGDONGHUIZI(TGC090023).pdf
http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/5702/
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score 13.211869

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