An Experimental Study On The Teacher's Corrective Feedback Against Grammatical Fossilization In Written Productions Of College Students

Many studies on interlanguage fossilization carried out over the past three decades has been and continues to be an area of some controversy and debate has led to the emergence of the plethora of perceptions on its nature, causation and defossilizing strategies. Against this background of "interesting times" for explanations of interlanguage fossilization phenomenon, this thesis reports an experimental study, which, taking teacher's corrective feedback as an intervention tool, to examine its effects on defossilizing the errors of some basic grammatical items in some students' written productions.The experiment takes "pretest, posttest control group design", where subjects are randomly assigned to either the experimental group or the control group and a premeasurement is taken on each group. The study revealed evidence indicating that teacher written feedback helped the learners to counteract the fossilization of target areas in their writings and heightened their awareness of the uses in target areas. EG outperformed CG after the treatment of corrective feedback in their writing process. But one thing worth noticing is that the positive effect of corrective feedback is not statistically significant in this group of learners, especially in terms of long-term efficacy. Then two subjects in EG are discussed in greater detail to examine student engagement with teacher's feedback over the whole process.In the end the paper cautions that it would be premature to rule out the possibility that teacher written feedback on students' fossilization in their writings can have beneficial outcomes.