A Study On Fossilization In English Writing For Vocational English Majors

Writing, as one of the most important output skills in English learning,reveals the learners’ comprehensive ability in language learning. However,writing has long been considered as a very thorny problem by numerouseducators and language teachers. A large number of language learners complainthat their writing ability is far from satisfying. Frankly speaking, if the languagelearners’ writing ability has not been improved for a very long time, fossilizationin their writing has already occurred stealthily. Thus, it is necessary andimperative to carry out the study dealing with fossilization in language learners’written output in order to improve the learners’ writing performance.Taking this view into consideration, the present thesis adopted fossilizationtheory and error analysis theory with the purpose of investigating the fossilizationphenomenon in English writing among vocational English majors. In this thesis,142vocational English majors coming from2different grades with different yearsof schooling of Xi’an Polytechnic University were chosen as the research subjects.The author employed qualitative analysis including the deep analysis of thesubjects’ written outputs and the analysis of questionnaires. The research wascarried out from three aspects, that is, lexical, grammatical and syntactical errorsin the subjects’ compositions. There are great findings after a thorough analysis ofthe collected data from the subjects’ writing errors and the questionnaires throughSPSS and Micro-soft Excel, which are listed as follows:First and foremost, the research confirmed the fact that fossilization hasalready occurred in the vocational English majors’ writing and it was really astumbling block in improving the subjects’ writing ability. In addition, the result shows that the longer school years the students have,the fewer grammatical errors they would make; however, the2groups have nosignificant differences in lexical and syntactic aspects. Therefore, it can beconcluded that fossilization has occurred in the latter two aspects and it is likely tooccur in grammatical aspect.Last but not least, the result makes it clear that the learning motivation,native language transfer, language input, teachers’ reactions to students’ errorsand learning strategies are the leading causes of fossilization in vocationalEnglish majors’ writing through the thorough analysis of questionnaire.In short, the author believes that the investigation of fossilization amongvocational English majors can enrich the fossilization literature and can providesome insights for vocational English majors’ L2learning and teaching eventhough there are some insufficiencies in the current study.