A Study On The Effect Of Recitation In Reducing Language Fossilization

Most of the English learners, especially adults, often meet the problems of language fossilization in their English studies, because of which they can hardly get obvious progresses as much as before. The three features of fossilization——prevalence, persistency and permanency seriously affect normal development of their interlanguage and make it quite difficult for them to get further improvement, even if they have tried very hard on that.The causes of fossilization are very complicated and until now there isn't a final agreement about which is the most important one. However, if we try to find out the methods to reduce fossilization according to each cause, of course, it will be comprehensive, but also unfocused and unrealistic. Therefore, instead of working on every cause exhaustively and blindly, this dissertation chose to take the perspective of language input only, and make a vertical and in-depth study on the mitigation of fossilization, for language input is critical in foreign language study and fossilization alleviation, especially for people in the native environment. Only with large amount of qualified Comprehensible Input can the English learners overcome the interference of mother tongue, standardize the language output and finally reduce the language fossilization, otherwise all the efforts would be in vain. However, even if people have the chance to get enough Comprehensive Input, Affective Filter and Noticing make it impossible to totally adopt and further turn them into their own language. In order to break the bottlenecks, a way must be found and then the author thought of recitation——a way based on comprehension. As not only can it provides large amount of Comprehensible Input, but also has great advantages in overcoming the Affective Filter and Noticing. In order to prove the hypothesis, the author designed a four-month experiment with the subjects of two sophomore classes in Hebei University. One of the classes took recitation teaching plan and the other did not. The result showed that the former made much more progress than the later. So recitation does have obvious effect in reducing language fossilization and facilitating language acquisition.The whole dissertation contains five chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction, which is to tell the research background, innovation and main structure of this dissertation. Chapter 2 is a literature review, which is to give a detailed introduction to the related theories of fossilization, language input and recitation. Chapter 3 focuses on the empirical study, which explicitly presents the design and arrangements of the experiment. Chapter 4 tells the result of the empirical study according to the statistics from the experiment. Chapter 5 makes a summary of the whole dissertation, points out the shortcomings of this paper and provides suggestion for further study.