A Study Of Senior High School Students’ English Fossilization

“Fossilization” as a linguistic term was firstly put forward by Selinker(1972) in hisinterlanguage theory. It refers to the phenomenon that language errors and non-target formsbecome fixed in the learner’ interlanguage and that language development slows or even stopsbefore the learning curve climbs once again.With the deepening of the English learning and teaching, fossilization, as onephenomenon in the development process of interlanguage, has become one crucial topic in thefield of second language acquisition. Up to the present day, a good many researches have beendone on the topic of fossilization with the purpose of exploring the possible solutions to thisissue. However, most of these studies focus on the hypothetical and theoretical analysis offossilization sources. The main limitation here is the lack of empirical studies of fossilizationboth at home and abroad.Based on the studies at home and abroad, this thesis probes into the phenomenon offossilization of the Chinese English learners in senior high school. The objectives of the studyare: to identify and analyze the fossilized linguistic items in the writing output of someChinese senior high school students; to investigate the causes of their fossilized errors; topropose some strategies to prevent fossilization.The subjects of this study are senior students at the same class of Jingxian Middle School inHengshui, Hebei Province. The study explores the different types of errors in the Englishcompositions of the subjects across their learning at Grades10and11. All the errors in thesample compositions are categorized from the linguistic perspective. And three main kinds oferrors are located: lexical errors, grammatical errors, and syntactic errors. What’s more,sixteen kinds of specific errors are identified and analyzed in details with examples. With thehelp of Excel2003, it is discovered that almost the same kinds of errors in the subjects’written production in English still exist after one-year learning in senior high school. And themost common errors in the subjects’ English compositions are regarded as fossilized errors.Based on the data analysis, the author makes an attempt to explore some causes of thefossilized errors/fossilization of the senior high school students in the process of learning English. The causes involve improper learning strategies, inadequate vocabularies,unawareness of English collocations, and overgeneralization of grammar rules and so on. Inaddition, the thesis offers some strategies which may be useful for English teaching in seniorhigh school in China, for example: ensuing the quantity and quality of second language input,providing timely and targeted feedback, and enhancing acculturation, etc.