The Causes Of Fossilization And Destabilizing Strategies

Fossilization is the phenomenon that linguistic items, rules, and subsystems of speakers of a particular NL tend to persist in their IL relative to a particular TL. The age of the learners and the amount of input they are exposed to have no defossilizing effect. Fossilization is a vital obstacle for L2 learners' development of their IL due to its special persisting nature, and causes the ambiguity in the theoretical framework due to its complexity and variability. Therefore, this paper begins with the evaluation of various definitions of fossilization, and shifts its focus from general fossilization to stabilization (temporary fossilization) after the introduction of Selinker's two classifications of this phenomenon.The main purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to clarify the causes of fossilization; second, to put forward some destabilizing strategies and verify their effectiveness. In order to avoid all the deficiencies of the previous fossilization studies, this paper bases its theoretical discussion on a longitudinal case study, through which the author identifies three types of temporarily fossilized errors of leading to permanent fossilization and some potentially stabilized errors. After the identification of these errors, the author reveals their causal factors through a discussion mainly from the semiotic and psychological perspectives: the lack of motivation and the failure in carrying out self-monitor strategy work in tandem to cause the temporary fossilization.After clarifying the causes of stabilization of the three types of errors, the author puts forward the destabilizing strategies according to Multiple Effect Principles (Selinker, 1992). The author suggests that an effective destabilizing strategy should aim at all the causal factors that work in tandem, otherwise itcannot overcome fossilization completely. This hypothesis is examined through an empirical study in the last chapter of this paper. Error correction, which is applied to help learners exercise the function of monitor strategy, only leads to a sharp reduction of some fossilized syntactic errors in participants' output, but it doesn't eliminate all of such errors.