Fossilization Of Grammar Errors & Destabilizing Strategies

Fossilization is the phenomenon that linguistic items, rules, and subsystems of speakers of a particular native language tend to persist in their interlanguage relative to a particular target language. The age of the learners and the amount of input they are exposed to have no defossilizing effect (Selinker, 1972). Now that fossilization is a vital obstacle for ESL/EFL learners' continual and stable development of their interlanguage, it has become one of the heated studying focuses in the SLA field. This paper concentrates on the study of one aspect of fossilization -fossilization of grammar errors, and its main purpose is twofold: firstly, to analyze the main grammar errors found in the subjects' written output to check whether they have the tendency to stabilize; secondly, to put forward some destabilizing strategies and verify their effectiveness.Based on an eight-week-long longitudinal study, this paper has obtained plenty of first-hand data reflecting the interlanguage development of 18 English majors of Shaanxi Normal University. In the first four-week-long stage, the author collected and classified different grammar errors exposed and the stubborn ones became the objects of the following research. In the second four-week-long stage, two destabilizing strategies, feedback strategy and self-monitor strategy, were adopted. The subjects were to apply all the previously wrongly-used structures into every piece of their new writing at least once (prepositional phrases being the exception). A lengthways comparison between the ratios of the same erroneous grammar item in the two experimental stages connotes that two different types of errors were discovered - one type of errors has the potentiality to stabilize and the other type is the virtually stabilized one. While observing these errors, the author also revealed the causal factor(s) of each of them. Two other delayed-effect destabilizing strategies were only discussed in this paper due to the shortage of time for their being carried out in this research.Grounding upon the result of the experiment, the author put forward some pedagogical implications which may benefit the EFL teaching in China. However hard destabilization is, teachers should exert themselves to help learners reduce thereappearing errors though no best remedy can be discovered to eradicate fossilized errors.