A Study On Non-english Major Postgraduates' Interlanguage Fossilization

The term interlanguage (IL) was proposed by the famous linguist Larry Selinker in 1972 in his thesis with the same title, referring to the systematic knowledge of language which is independent of the native language and the target language system. Interlanguage has the characteristics of systematisity, permeability, dynamic and fossilization. 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. 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 do not have any progress after several years of studying the language; at least they cannot see obvious progress.Since fossilization is a universal phenomenon in the second language development and a huge barrier for successful second language teaching and learning, it has become one of the popular issues in the second language acquisition (SLA). Over the past 30 years, a number of works have been published on this issue with a view to working out feasible solutions to the problem. They mainly discuss such topics as the definitions and interpretations of fossilization, the causes associated with fossilization and possible strategies dealing with it. While most of these researches focus basically on the theoretical and hypothetical analysis of the sources of fossilization, the lack of empirical evidence is the primary limitation in language fossilization studies at home and abroad.Inspired and stimulated by the achievements in fossilization research at home and abroad, the author intends to probe into the fossilization phenomenon among some Chinese non-English major postgraduates. In this thesis, after the literature review, errors in the compositions of non-English major postgraduates from three different grades of Shandong University of Science and Technology are studied and analyzed to find out the common types of errors and error frequencies. Then the author uses the software SPSS to analyze the data. The result indicates there are no significant differences among the three grades in error frequencies, thus showing the possibility of IL fossilization. With the help of questionnaire and interview, the thesis makes an attempt to analyze the cause of errors with fossilization tendency, including incorrect verb forms, misspellings, Chinglish, incorrect number of nouns and pronouns and incorrect article forms. Based on the analysis, the thesis proposes strategies to overcome fossilization:enhancing the learner's motivation, giving effective feedback to the errors, reducing the negative influence of Chinese on English learning, reinforcing their awareness of fossilized errors and grammar, and providing accurate and appropriate input.The author believes 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 postgraduate English teaching and learning more effective.