A Study Of Fossilization And Activating Strategies In Spoken English

Nowadays much attention has been paid to fossilization by researchers in the field of applied linguistics. Thus, the theories of fossilization have been well developed with many new ideas emerging in this field. But by now there is little done in breaking fossilization and activating fossilized language in practice. This paper explores into the activating strategies of fossilization. This thesis discusses its causes and strategies by analyzing the related researches and the data from a one-year study the author has conducted on Chinese learners' spoken English acquisition.The thesis consists of four sections:The first section introduces the fruits of the study of fossilization in terms of the concepts, causes and activating strategies and analyzes their significance and flaw to this study. Besides, it also points out the importance of this study.The causes of fossilization have been analyzed on biological, sociacultural, linguistic, communicative, cognitive and psychological domains.We base our analysis on the followings theories: Lenneberg and Lamendella's Age Theory, Shumann's Acculturation Model, Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Affective Filter Hypothesis, Gardner's Social Education Mode, Vigil and Oiler's Feedback Hypothesis and Sims's Strategy Theory, etc. Many linguists think it impossible to break fossilization and activate fossilized language, while still a few linguists have gone further into this study. For example, Krashen and Nakuma raise their hypotheses to solve this problem. Graham and Richard go further to justify it even through teaching experiments. The present research on breaking fossilization is rather limited.The author expounds the property of spoken English and the universality of fossilization in learns' spoken English in the second section. Spoken English is a...