A Corpus-based Analysis Of Interlanguage Fossilization Of Chinese Non-English-Major College English Learners

Most of Chinese students have many problems in the process of learning English that they always make mistakes which cannot be corrected no matter how hard they try to. This phenomenon is called fossilization of interlanguage in second language acquisition which has drawn great attention from many researchers in linguistics. Fossilization phenomenon is characteristic of complexity, which is ubiquitous in each level of English language system, ranging from phonetic, phonology, syntactics to discourse, semantic and pragmatic. Fossilization phenomenon is featured with reoccurrence and persistence, which can be observed in any learning stage of English learners.In recent years, domestic researches on fossilization have diverted from purely theoretical discussions to the combination of theoretical discussion and empirical research. With the establishment of several corpora at home, such as Gui Shichun and Yang Huizhong’s Chinese Learner English Corpus, many researches focus on the analysis of interlanguage fossilization from different perspectives based on CLEC and other corpora. On the basis of contrast analysis and error analysis, with the help of concordance software, this study tentatively conducts a corpus-based study of Chinese college students’ words errors, with expectations to explore fossilization phenomenon at word levels.This study focuses on the following two research questions:1) What are manifestations of fossilization in words of Chinese college students?2) Are there any similarities or differences of fossilization of Chinese college students in different learning stages at word level?CLEC is a learner corpus is employed in this study. This study chooses ST3sub-corpus and ST4sub-corpus in CLEC to analyze the words errors of Chinese college students, considering that students’ language proficiency can be authentic without any other assistive tools. Firstly, the frequencies of Chinese college students’ words errors are counted with the help of concordance software; then this study gives a detailed description of each type of words errors and reveals the similarities and differences of fossilization at word level of Chinese college students in different learning stages.The major findings in this study are as follows:1) Chinese college students’ fossilization are manifested in errors of verb, noun, pronoun, preposition;2) The similarity of fossilization at word level of Chinese college students in diflferent learning stages is that the general tendency of each type of fossilization at word level is consistent; The difference of fossilization at word level of Chinese college students in different learning stages is that the the frequency of word errors fossilized in different learning stages is different.On the basis of research findings and related discussions in the previous chapters, some pedagogical implications for second language teaching and learning are offered in this study:increase correct target language input; standardize English teachers’ teaching input; corpus is an effective teaching assistive tool in foreign language teaching and leaning.