A Dynamic Study Of Stabilization And Potential Fossilization Of Subjunctive Mood By Chinese EFL Learners

Subjunctive mood is regarded as one of the major difficulties for Chinese EFL learners. Due to the negative transfer from mother tongue, Chinese students may experience stabilized interlanguage process. The author of this thesis attempts to investigate into the learning of subjunctive mood of English, hoping to provide some implications to its future teaching and learning. The present study adopts a pseudo-longitudinal, error analysis and feedback approaches to carry out a time series task, with the help of the combination of overall analyses and individual analyses to make a contrast between the fluency and accuracy of written production and the use of subjunctive mood by English learners in college.In this study, four research questions are addressed:1. Which specific subjunctive structures are more prone to cause errors?2. Do English fluency and English accuracy relate to error occurrence? Better fluency and accuracy lead to fewer subjunctive errors?3. What are the main possible causes for students’errors in using subjunctive mood?4. Can corrective feedback affect development of stabilized features and destabilize?The major findings of this study are presented as follows:Firstly, based on the analyses of data collected, the subjunctive mood of contrary to past is incorrectly used by most students due to the request of combination of tense and auxiliary changes in if clause and main clause.Secondly, time series task indicates that general averages in two measures are making progress in fluency and accuracy in writing over the six months. It is observable that minimum words per-unit in December have reached eight and the maximum words have reached twelve, which indicates participants have made significant improvements. In terms of subjunctive mood, overall, it remains the same level after six months instruction and shows typical stabilized features.Thirdly, interlingual transfer, intralingual factors, ambiguity tolerance and avoidance are main possible causes for making errors in subjunctive mood uses.Fourthly, the corrective feedback shows no obvious effects on participants’ productions over long time.Finally, participants’ productions of subjunctive mood use are displaying stabilized features and potential fossilization even though they follow different patterns in their language progress in general.The implications of the present study:Firstly, the development patterns of students’ English written production are not linear. And that general averages cover a great deal of individual variability, so teachers’attention should at times switch to individual progress and performance at different learning stages.Secondly, as we have seen in previous sections, the negative transfer or mother tongue interference is the manifestation of interlanguage development and is difficult to overcome. The English teachers should introduce the form-focus and cross-linguistic contrast between Chinese and English.Thirdly, subjunctive mood should be learned and seen from its pragmatics and social communicative functions. So teacher should encourage students to do some task-based activities involving subjunctive mood in order to develop their interests.Fourthly, the new perspective, psychological reality represented by subjunctive mood should be introduced to classroom.However, the present study has its own limitations. First, the sample volume of the study is not big enough to show the general subjunctive mood uses by English learners in china. Second, as a case and pseudo-longitudinal study, the time range is relatively short. Third, due to the absence of spoken production of subjunctive mood, the author has no access to make a comparison between the written production and spoken production.