A Study On Interlanguage Fossilization Among Non-English Majors In English Writings

As we all known, interlanguage fossilization is a common and widely spread phenomenon in the process of second language learning. According to Selinker, interlanguage is established as learners’ independent system of the second language which is of neither the native language nor the second language, but a continuum or approximation from his native language to the target language. As he puts it,"fossilizable linguistic phenomena are linguistic items, rules and subsystems which speakers of a particular NL tend to keep in their IL relative to a particular TL, no matter what the age of the learner or amount of explanation and instruction he receives in the TL."(ibid)Fossilization exists in Chinese college students, especially in non-English majors, and has been an urgent issue to be solved in foreign language teaching. Inspired and stimulated by the achievements in fossilization phenomenon, the author carries an investigation among some Chinese non-English majors in Inner Mongolia Normal University. Based on Selinker’s theory, the thesis aims to study IL fossilization in college writing of non-English majors. First of all, this thesis is mainly based on Selinker’s theories of fossilization. The author recalls the literature review of fossilization theory and its related theories:Besides, the author reviews the development of its definition, and synthesizes the theoretical explanations for fossilizations so far. Secondly, the author analyzes the fossilization phenomena of non-English college majors. In this thesis, both qualitative and quantitative studies are applied, which help to explore Chinese L2learners’ fossilization further. The data obtained from the quantitative study are analyzed by statistical analysis software SPSS. The qualitative research serves as the supporting and complementary information to the quantitative findings of the study. By analyzing the errors in English writing of freshmen and sophomores, all together90subjects, enrolled in2009and2010majoring in Law&Politics at Inner Mongolia Normal University. And the author compares the learners’errors of the two groups; the thesis tries to find out the common types of errors and error frequencies. The author uses the software SPSS to analyze the data. The result indicates there are no significant differences between two groups in frequencies, thus showing the possibility of IL fossilization. Meanwhile, this thesis also attached questionnaires to investigate the reasons of fossilization in the process of English learning; proposed the students to apply scientific and reasonable learning strategies.Finally, based on this research, the author presents some related strategies of overcoming fossilization and pedagogical implications. By this way, the students can avoid or reduce the fossilization as much as possible, which makes the English learning more effectively. At the same time, the author also puts forward some limitations of the research.