Study On Interlanguage Fossilization In English Writing Of Non-English Major College Students

Selinker(1972) pointed out that interlanguage refers to an inherently variable systematic system which is not only different from the native language but also differs from the target language. Interlanguage continues to approximate the target language, but it never reaches it. Every second language learner is somewhere along the interlanguage continuum; in the process of getting closer to the target language, the interlanguage errors are corrected continuously, and meanwhile the new errors occur. Fossilization occurs when the second language learners’ interlanguage systems come into a certain level and begin to stagnate, causing the problem that the interlanguage errors are fixed as the language habit. For a second language learner, it is possible for fossilization to occur in any stage of his learning, and sometimes even the further study cannot change this situation. Therefore, fossilization is the enormous impediment in second language acquisition, and the research on fossilization plays a crucial and vital role in the area of second language acquisition.231 compositions of non-English major college students are selected from the Cool Sentence Correcting Network, and each sampled composition consists of twice of the writing: the first draft and the final draft; then a self-made corpus is made. According to the error classifications of Carl James, a theoretical framework is concluded, and the interlanguage errors occurring in the samplings are categorized with this new framework as the standard. With the assistance of statistics in the questionnaire, a quantitative analysis is conducted on the interlanguage fossilization in English writing of non-English major college students. Finally, the reasons for fossilization and the measures for defossilization are put forward.The research major findings show that the interlanguage fossilization really exists in non-English major college students’ compositions. The frequently-occurred error types in their English writing have the tendency to fossilize. There are four major possible reasons for fossilization: negative language transfer, influence of cultural transfer, inappropriate learning strategies, and unfavorable learning motivation; poor quality of typing should be taken into consideration, for the samples in this research are collected from Internet. Meanwhile, the Cool Sentence Correcting Network surely has some positive functions in reducing the interlanguage errors and in defossilization; however, these functions are adversely influenced to a great extent by its own deficiencies and students’ negative attitude.All in all, this thesis targets at giving complementarities and inspiration to the analysis on interlanguage fossilization in the area of second language acquisition. At the same time, it is hoped that it will be helpful in the further developments of the Cool Sentence Correcting Network.