A Study Of Interlanguage Fossilization And Its Countermeasures In Vocational College Students' Translation Practice

"Fossilization"as a linguistic term refers to the phenomenon that language errors andnon-target forms become fixed in the IL, which is a universal yet difficult problem in secondlanguage acquisition. The process of improving their IL (interlanguage) demonstrates howlanguage learners acquire a second language, while the stubborn nature of IL fossilizationprevents them from developing their IL to the TL (target language). It has become a big barrierfor most language learners in the process of language learning. The author noticed that ILfossilization is an inevitable phenomenon in the process of foreign language learning invocational colleges, as a group fossilization, which has become an urgent issue in L2 teaching.This study was undertaken to find out how the fossilization in translation activities of vocationalcollege students can be eliminated based on the analysis of students'fossilized errors in theirtranslation.The author collected data of non-target fossilized forms from students'translation practiceand confirmed the assumptions: What caused frequent fossilized errors is that they are short ofawareness of correct and idiomatic English expressions and have no clear understanding betweenthe differences of the two languages.Based on these findings, the author carried out an empirical study in the thesis aiming atfinding a solution of getting over these fossilized errors. In the experimental class, the teacher issupposed to apply such following strategies: increase students'motivation of learning; they areexposed to a large amount of idiomatic English materials; help students in realizing thedifferences between Chinese and English in terms of the input, culture of the language,psychological mode and the specific manifestation of the language; what's more, students arerequired to do a lot of training in the comparison of fossilized errors with idiomatic expressionfrom the angle of grammar, lexis, syntax or even texts, which are designated to increase students'ability in classifying the difference between idiomatic English and fossilized language items. Theseries of strategies of de-fossilization, which are applied to help learners exercise the function ofmonitor strategy, only lead to a sharp reduction of some fossilized errors in participants'output,but it doesn't eliminate all of such errors.