Fossilization In Second Language Acquisition And Its Implications

The term "interlanguage" proposed by Selinker in 1972 is applied to elaborate the process of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). In the course of research on interlanguage, a phenomenon is always being concerned by researchers—fossilization. Fossilization is widespread in the process of SLA and has been seriously addressed by a number of researchers in the field of applied linguistics nowadays. The process of interlanguage's evolving progressively is the process of second language's continuous development. Nevertheless, fossilization keeps learners' interlanguage from making further progress towards the target language(TL), being an obstacle for learners' further improvement in their English level. The causes of fossilization are mainly: neurological maturation; communicative needs; loss of IL Permeability; various environmental factors; psychological factors; application of incorrect language learning strategies; psychological distance, etc. Fossilization exists in Chinese college students' especially in non-English majors' English learning and has been an urgent issue to be solved in foreign language teaching in China. Therefore, the thesis researches fossilization by individual case analysis. The common grammatical errors of some college non-English majors are studied and analyzed, with the purpose of revealing the tendency of fossilization. In addition, the thesis makes an attempt to analyze the cause of errors with fossilization tendency, pointing out the problems in present foreign language teaching in China. Based on the analysis, the thesis proposed strategies to overcome fossilization: in subjective aspects: students should enhance learning motivation, initiatively inputting perfect English expressions; in objective aspects: teachers should take error correction as a method of effective feedback to help students be aware of the differences between their own language output and English natives' output and differences between the two languages including different culture borne by languages, psychological factors and specific manifestation on different levels such as phonetics, grammar, lexis, syntax. Thus, the students' ability will be enhanced to discern correct English and erroneous English, perfect English and Ch-English. It will be a fundamental way to decrease error of fossilization, to lower the degree of errors' fossilization, to break the state of interlanguage fossilization, so that the interlanguage evolves progressively toward the target language.