A Study Of The Effect Of Oral Corrective Feedback In EFL Teaching On Reducing Language Fossilization

As Selinker (1972) put it,"most L2learners failed to reach target language competence. That is, they stoped learning when their internalized rule system contains rules that are different from those of the target language." Such a phenomenon is referred to as fossilization. Because of the three features of fossilization----prevalence, persistency and permanency, fossilization seriously affects normal development of their interlanguage and makes it quite difficult for second language learners to get further improvements, even if they have tried very hard on that.The causes of fossilization are very complicated and until now there is not 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, it will be of course comprehensive, but also unfocused and unrealistic. Therefore, this thesis takes the perspective of oral corrective feedback only to make an in-depth study of the alleviation of fossilization. The study of corrective feedback in English teaching has been a hot topic in the field of SLA in the recent decades. There have been many experimental studies on the effectiveness of corrective feedback in EFL teaching on defossilizing the errors of some basic grammatical items abroad. However, similar experimental studies are still relatively scarce in China. Therefore, this study takes the experimental method to firstly propose hypotheses and then test hypotheses. In order to prove the hypotheses, the author of this thesis designed a four-month experiment with subjects of two freshman classes in Inner Mongolia Agricultural University. Firstly, experimental data are obtained to examine whether fossilization exists. If do, whether four-month teacher’s oral corrective feedback in EFL teaching is helpful in counteracting fossilization of some basic grammatical items.The author of this thesis meticulously arranged experimental process, carefully monitored the implementation of experiment and seriously analyzed experimental data. The experimental results show that the experimental group makes much more progress than the control group. Teacher’s oral corrective feedback in EFL teaching is helpful in counteracting the fossilization of some basic grammatical items. Furthermore, the results also reveal that teachers should put more emphasis on the error correction in EFL classroom. Too much indulgence for errors may cause language fossilization.