An Analysis Of Fossilization In Non-English Majors In China

Interlanguage fossilization is a common phenomenon in the field of second language acquisition. Over the past 30 years or so, many researchers and linguists have made various careful studies on the phenomenon of fossilization and they have achieved a lot of insights in the studies and contributed greatly to foreign language teaching and learning. The study on fossilization phenomenon in SLA has been attracting more and more people's attention. However, it has not been sufficiently explored at both theoretical and empirical levels in the literature.The term interlanguage was proposed by famous linguist Larry Selinker in 1972 in his thesis with the same title. It was used to refer to the systematic knowledge of language which is independent of the native language and the target language system which the language learner is trying to learn. It takes the mother tongue as the starting point, and gradually approaches to the target language. It is the dynamic language system constructed by the language learners. Most of the English teachers and language learners have this kind of experience: unlike the previous period when they can make progress steadily, they just didn't have any progress after several years of studying the language and reach a certain period, at least they cannot see obvious progress.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 de-fossilizing effect.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. 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, and points out the problems in present foreign language teaching in China. Based on the analysis, the thesis proposed strategies to overcome fossilization: providing accurate and appropriate input, enhancing the learner's motivation, reducing the negative influence of Chinese on English learning, and having a correct understanding of the learner's errors, then giving effective feedback, etc.Finally, the author thinks that understanding and analyzing interlanguage fossilization can facilitate the understanding of the theory of foreign language learning and it may also be helpful for searching for pedagogical strategies that can make foreign language teaching and learning more effective, although there are still some deficiencies in the previous research.