A Study Of Interlanguage Fossilization Among College Non-English Majors In English Writing

Selinker put forward the term"interlanguage"in 1972, which was used to explain the stages of Second Language Acquisition (SLA).A phenomenon is always being paid attention by researchers in the course of research on interlanguage—fossilization. Fossilization is a universal phenomenon in interlanguage development. This phenomenon has attracted the attention of many researchers in the field of applied linguistics nowadays.Based on the researches at home and abroad, the author makes an empirical study on interlanguage fossilization in English writing of 100 college non-English majors ranging from Grade 1 and Grade 3 in Liaoning Technical University. Through error analysis on the sample compositions of two groups, the author confirms the occurrence of fossilization among college non-English majors. Then the author tries to investigate the possible causes of fossilization by distributing questionnaires to the subjects. On the basis of the analyses of the causes, the author has put forward some tentative suggestions to avoid or reduce fossilization.This study seeks to achieve three purposes: (1) To find out the similarities of errors shared by the freshmen and juniors in their English writing and prove that language fossilization is a universal phenomenon among college non-English majors. (2) To explore the sources of fossilization through questionnaires. (3) To put forward some de-fossilizing strategies based on the results of questionnaires.This thesis not only enriches the literature of interlanguage fossilization in empirical study but also provides some important insights for college English teaching in the future.