A Study On Interlanguage Fossilized Pronunciation Of English-major Students From Southeastern Gansu Province

Interlanguage fossilization is a universal phenomenon in the process of secondlanguage acquisition and it is also an important distinctive feature between secondlanguage acquisition and mother tongue acquisition. Interlanguage fossilization largelyrestricts the development of L2learners’ interlanguage. As the core issue of interlanguagetheory, fossilization has increasingly attracted prevalent attention among both languageresearchers and language teachers. Since the notion was put forward, researchers havepublished a large amount of articles, aiming to analyze interlanguage fossilization fromdifferent perspectives, discuss its definition and causes. However, most of these studiesonly emphasize on the introduction of the concept and theoretical analysis, whileneglecting the longitudinal and empirical studies on fossilization.Pronunciation is the basic element of any language. Among all the linguistic items,fossilized pronunciation items are always the first noticeable factors that hamper thelearner’s mastery of the target language. Southeastern Gansu is comprised of fourmunicipalities, namely Tianshui, Longnan, Pingliang and Qingyang, the population ofwhich accounts for39.5%of that of Gansu province. In the teaching practice, it is foundthat English-majors from Southeastern Gansu always commit some shared pronunciationerrors, which will gradually fossilize when not being corrected. Thus, these fossilizeditems will keep students’ pronunciation from further developing. In order to have aprofound understanding of fossilized pronunciation and provide some guidance to theteaching practice, based on the interlanguage fossilization theory proposed by LarrySelinker, this proposed thesis tentatively adopts both qualitative and quantitative methodsand makes use of such two instruments as pseudo-longitudinal study and questionnairestudy to explore the fossilized pronunciation among the English majors from SoutheasternGansu.The research questions are as follows:(1) Does the obvious phenomenon ofinterlanguage pronunciation fossilization exist among the English major students fromsoutheastern Gansu?(2) What segmental phonemes are easy to fossilize?(3) What suprasegmental phonemes are easy to fossilize?(4) What important factors have causedthe fossilized pronunciation?The subjects of this research are composed by English-majors in Tianshui NormalUniversity. Five groups of subjects are from Grade2007, Grade2008, Grade2009, Grade2010and Grade2011respectively. There are sixteen students from southeastern Gansu ineach group and in total80students serve as the subjects for this research. In thepseudo-longitudinal study, the author conducts the pronunciation test to all the subjectsand the whole process is recorded with the purpose of collecting the datal and analyzingthe actual performance of their fossilized pronunciation. In addition, the author carries outa questionnaire study to all subjects and collects the basic data about their Englishlearning status.The results of the pseudo-longitudinal study and questionnaire study constitute theempirical data of the research. The data obtained from the research are statisticallyanalyzed. The major findings derived from the analysis of the pronunciation test togetherwith the questionnaire are shown as follows:1. Some pronunciation errors among the English major students from southeasternGansu show a high tendency to fossilize. The pronunciation of English major students iseasier to fossilize at suprasegmental level than segmental level. In addition, it is alsofound that the obvious backsliding of pronunciation among subjects and backslidingoccurs since the student’s second year in the university.2.The easily fossilized phonemes at segmental level include monophthong lengthconfusion (/i:/,/i/,/u:/,/u/,/:/,//,/:/,//), front vowels (/e/,//), back vowels (//),reduced closing diphthongs (/ei/,/ai/,/i/,/u/,/au/), fricatives(/θ/,/e/,/s/,/z/,/v/),nasals (/n/,//), lateral (/l/) as well as approximant(/w/).3. The easily fossilized suprasegmental phonemes are largely related to word stress,sentence stress, linking, assimilation, consonant cluster, grammatical marker as well asintonation.Based on the above findings and the results from questionnaire, the author concludesthat the possible causes of fossilized pronunciation are mainly constituted by thefollowing six aspects, namely: language transfer, lack of optimal language input, lack of instruction, absence of corrective feedback, lack of sensitivity in the target language andovergeneralization.Thereafter, six counter-measures to defossilize are put forward by the authoraccordingly, including avoiding the negative transfer of L1, providing right kind offeedback, providing optimal input, improving English teacher’s quality, providingadequate instruction and developing learner’s monitor.