Analysis Of Fossilization In Chinese Students' EFL Writings

This study is undertaken to describe, classify and analyze fossilization , a phenomenon in Chinese EFL students' interlanguage, through error analysis and quantitative and qualitative analyses. The author carries out an investigation by making error analysis among Chinese EFL learners' composition in different levels (chosen from CLEC corpus). The author classifies errors into non-text errors, lexical errors, grammatical errors and pragmatic errors and both qualitative and quantitative analyses are applied to give a concrete explanation for fossilization. After the data analysis, the author finds out that the more proficient the students are at English or the higher their English levels are, the fewer non-text errors and grammatical errors they will make. On the contrary, no matter how excellent the students are in English proficiency, they will inevitably make lexical and pragmatic errors easily. In a word, the lexical and pragmatic errors are the ones that are much more easily fossilized. Then, the author provides a theoretical analysis of the causes of both soft fossilized errors (non-text errors and grammatical errors) and hard-fossilized errors (lexical errors and pragmatic errors) respectively and finds out that mother tongue transfer and cultural distance are the major causes of fossilization phenomenon.