An Empirical Study On Chinese L2 Learners' Interlanguage Fossilization

As the universal phenomenon in interlanguage development and also a tremendous obstacle for L2 learners' interlanguage development, fossilization has attracted prevalent attention among both language researchers and teachers. However, most of the studies only emphasize fossilization that takes place at the level of the linguistic forms, while neglect fossilization which happens in the practical language use, thus the incompletion of exploring interlanguage fossilization easily comes into being. Therefore, this MA thesis will tend to probe into interlanguage fossilization from the combination of both the traditional linguistic way and also the pragmatic way.The major research questions are as follows: (1).What are the causal factors of fossilization in Chinese college English learning, and also to what degree? (2).What pedagogical implications can we get from the interlanguage fossilization of Chinese college English learners? And these two research questions will be answered in detail in this thesis.The whole 82 students of non-English majors who are all sophomores from a natural class of Southwest Jiao Tong University serve as the subjects of this research. Both qualitative and quantitative studies are applied in this thesis, which help to further explore Chinese L2 learners' fossilization failure.In qualitative research, the author mainly adopted such methods as observation and error analysis to analyze the 82 subjects' specific performance in the writing test. While in the quantitative study, the author carried out a questionnaire, including such three aspects as subjects' basic information of learning English, linguistic proficiency test and pragmatic proficiency test. The results of these tests constitute the empirical data of the quantitative study. The data obtained from the quantitative study are analyzed by statistical analysis software SPSS. The qualitative research serves as the supporting and complementary information to the quantitative findings of the study.Based on the previous research, a research on both linguistic fossilization as well as pragmatic fossilization is carried out through three main instruments: questionnaire, writing test and classroom observation, together with structured interview.The major findings which are derived from the analysis of the questionnaire, structured interview, together with writing test are shown as follows:1. There are two types of fossilization: linguistic fossilization and pragmatic fossilization.2. Fossilization widely exists among Chinese college students in their English learning.3. Both of L2 learners' internal and external aspects influence their language competence. L2 learners' internal factors are the main stream of fossilization, whileexternal factors affect fossilization indirectly.4. Accordingly, fossilization can be delayed or reduced through learners' internal and external facets.The significance of this proposed study is three folded in exploring Chinese L2 learners' fossilization. For one thing, the author describes learners' fossilization problems, with the purpose to help language learners to have a brief concept upon interlanguage development which will aid them to have the awareness to reduce fossilization and naturally benefit both L2 teaching and learning. For another, the author discusses the casual factors of fossilization and also how to reduce fossilization in practice, which will help language teachers and learners to penetrate into better L2 teaching and learning. Consequently, this study puts forward some pedagogic implications by means of the overall discussion of Chinese L2 learners' fossilization problems; hence fulfill the aim of improving both the teaching and learning effects of Chinese college English.To sum up, fossilization is common among Chinese college students in their English learning process. Defossilization can be achieved through internal and external aspects. And it is of universal significance in the formal instruction.