On Defossilization In English Learning Of Vocational College Students

The term "fossilization" proposed by Selinker in 1972 in interlanguage theory was applied to elaborate the cessation of the process of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). This phenomenon has drawn the attention of many researchers in the field of applied linguistics nowadays, but both at home and abroad, the present researches mainly focus on theoretical research and analysis, this SLA characteristic has not been sufficiently explored on empirical level, especially on breaking fossilization which is rather limited. Therefore, to make further exploration of this phenomenon has important theoretical and practical significance.Fossilization is a widespread phenomenon in foreign language learning and also a very difficult problem that has not been solved. Vocational college education is one of the main parts of higher education in China, the phenomenon of "time-wasting but inefficiency" is universal in English learning of vocational college students but paid little attention so far. On the basis of the deficiencies of previous studies, this study aims at making an empirical survey on fossilization and its root causes and proposing some effective strategies for defossilization.The author first analyses the present state of English teaching and learning in vocational college, pointing out the importance and necessity of this research, and then chooses twelve classes of different hierarchies from Hunan Mechanical & Electrical Polytechnic as the subjects to take part in this empirical study which is carried out by questionnaires and interview. Two questionnaires are designed to investigate this phenomenon. One is on the state of fossilization, it falls into three aspects: the time of fossilization, the areas of fossilization and the distribution of fossilization. The other one is on the root causes of fossilization. The results show that fossilization exists in large areas and easily appears in Grade One. Vocabulary occupies the largest fossilized areas in English language knowledge while speaking takes up the largest fossilized areas in English communicative competence. The author tries to trace the main causes of fossilization from cognitive factors, affective factors, learning strategies and language input and output as well as critical causes of English learning stops evolving. This survey provides a reliable basis for testify this phenomenon.Based on the results of the survey, the author conducts an attempted experimental research on defossilization under the guidance of the input hypothesis, the output hypothesis and the constructivist theory. This experiment is carried out in a term, systematic teaching measures under the constructivism are adopted in the experimental group to make a contrastive study, the result of this experiment is also displayed and analyzed by observation, questionnaire, interview and tests, which shows that the experimental group makes greater progress than the control group and fossilization is being overcome gradually. The author carries out this de-fossilizing experiment and verifies its effectiveness. What' s more, the author advocates more tentative suggestions for defossilization such as creating a good language input environment, reducing the chances of native language interference and increasing the opportunities of language output etc.