An Empirical Study On The English Lexical Defossilization Among The College Students

The phenomenon of “fossilization” is initiated by the British linguist LarrySelinker. According to him,95%of the second language learners have great difficultyin achieving the ultimate attainment of the target language, namely, after a period ofsteady improvement, vast majority of the second language learners cannot constantlylearn the language smoothly as they do at the very beginning. What’s worse, they maybe even immersed in a learning plateau where their learning competence becomesstagnant. It is generally accepted that having a good knowledge of vocabulary isproportional to the language competence. As for the foreign language teaching,nothing can be obtained without the cornerstone of vocabulary.“Fossilization” in English vocabulary teaching is mainly reflected in two facets:firstly, the limited vocabulary size, quantity “fossilization”, which means mostlearners cannot continue to expand their vocabulary size after they have masteredcertain vocabulary; secondly, the restricted word meaning, quality “fossilization”,which refers to learners are constrained to the one-sided word view and they cannotmake wise use of the polysemy.This paper tries to study how to defossilize the English vocabulary from theperspective of Langacker’s cognitive grammar theories. With a series of empiricalstudies such as questionnaire and vocabulary test, the writer aims to reveal theconditions of college students in terms of lexical “fossilization”. Based on theprevious theoretical and empirical researches, the paper mainly focuses on thefollowing three problems:(1) During the process of vocabulary acquisition, if there isany difference between the sophomores and seniors in the aspect of lexical“fossilization”.(2) If it is the case, what does that imply? If not, how does thedivergence precipitate both in terms of “quantity” and “quality”.(3) What are thepossible reasons for the above problems? To solve these problems, the writer adoptsboth qualitative and quantitative research methods to explore the college students’lexical “fossilization”.140subjects from Shandong Normal University are engaged inthis survey, including70sophpmores and70seniors. In the study of vocabulary size, Nation’s Vocabulary Levels Test is adopted todesign the word test while in the study of vocabulary quality, two large domesticcorpora-Chinese Learner English Corpus and English-Chinese Parallel Corpus areused to design the translation test. In addition, the writer also tries to conclude themain reasons for lexical “fossilization” based on the results of the questionnaire andtests.Data obtained from the investigations are mainly presented through the statisticalanalysis software SPSS17.0and the findings are mainly embodied in the followingthree aspects:(1) Lexical “fossilization” does exist in both of the two groupsregardless of sex, grade and major, etc.(2) In general, sophomores use more lowfrequency words than seniors, which indicates that their vocabulary size is slightlysmaller. However, they are superior to the latter in memorizing the word meanings,which shows that semantic “fossilization” is more likely to happen in the fourth grade.(3) According to the questionnaire and the tests, this paper concludes six factors thatmay lead to the lexical “fossilization”: inappropriate learning strategies, lack oflearning motivation, insufficient lexical input, inadequate lexical output, improperteaching strategies and lack of prompt feedback.Finally, the paper tries to combine the eclecticism methodology, prototype theory,the theory of iconicity, category theory and grammaticalization theory with theEnglish vocabulary teaching practice, pinning the hope that the appliance ofLangacker’s grammar theories may shed some light on resolving the problem oflexical “fossilization”. The new theory can not only enrich the practicality and interestof English vocabulary teaching but also help college students achieve multipliereffects of vocabulary acquisition both in terms of quantity and quality.