The Study Of Selective Fossilization Of Inflectional Affix By Adult Chinese Learners Of English

The study of the interlanguage grammar system impairment has been researchedfor more than2decades by second language scholars. They have explored the L2learners’ acquisition of functional categories to find out whether their interlanguagegrammar system has impaired or not, which has been a controversy within thescholars. Nowadays, Han has put forward the theory “selective fossilizationhypothesis”, maintaining that adult L2learners have selectively failing to acquiresome linguistic features during the process of second language acquisition. It hasrendered a new perspective to investigate the L2learners’ interlanguage grammarimpairment relating to their selective fossilization.This thesis has mainly investigated the adult Chinese L2learners’ acquisition offunctional categories especially the change of forms about the past tense verbs andnoun plurals. The subjects consist of three different level groups who come fromOcean University of China and have been studying English for more than10years.They have been required to fulfill a task as classroom examination within30minutes.With the application of SPSS and One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), the resulthas showing that the participants have all presented great proficiency towards themastery of inflectional affix in the research tasks，although there has been asignificant difference between the former two advanced group and the elementarygroup towards the accuracy. It also shows that they have all exhibited moreproficiency about the regular inflectional changes than the irregular ones. That is tosay, their interlanguage grammar systems are unimpaired which has supported the“missing surface inflectional hypothesis”, but their knowledge of irregular change ofinflectional affix turned out to be selectively fossilized.This thesis has attempted to seek out the deep causes of selective fossilization within the unimpaired interlanguage grammar system. According to the theory“selective fossilization”, the L1unmarkedness and L2input unstableness have beenthe causes of L2learners’ misusing of irregular inflectional affix. At the same time,the study has provided some enlightens for second language teaching and suggestionsfor further study in the perspective of selective fossilization about functionalcategories.