A Corpus-based Study On Tense Fossilization In Oral Output Of Chinese Esl Learners

Fossilization has always been a topic of great importance in second languageresearch. A lot of research has been done both at home and abroad. Little of thisresearch is based on oral texts. Thus, fossilization in oral English is mostly leftuntouched. This is unfortunate, because oral expression in L2English is an importantcomponent of L2knowledge. This thesis fills this lack of knowledge by studying oraltexts in a corpus, with the aim of finding out the tense usage in oral English and thusto contribute to the teaching of spoken second language.Five questions are put forward in Chapter One. They are respectively: What arethe types and characteristics of tense errors in oral English? At what rate do thesetense errors occur? Do learners with a relatively high level of English and learnersith a relatively low level of English make different errors? What are the possiblecauses of tense fossilization in oral English? What measures should be taken againstfossilization?The main results are as follows. According to the error frequency, mostprevalent tense errors are made for the present tense, followed by past tense. Presentperfect tense ranks third and other tenses are unidentified because of their smallnumber and low frequency of usage. This means present tense is the easiest tofossilize, and past tense and present perfect tense are closely behind. Based on SPSSstatistics, there is no obvious difference between learners with high proficiency andlow proficiency. That is, no matter what level they are at, learners more or less makethe same errors in tense acquisition.The author afterwards analyzes the causes comprehensively. In order to makean explicit contribution to second language learning and teaching, the authorcontinues to propose some implications for tense acquisition in oral English.The results and implications will give some assistance for tense learning and helpovercome tense fossilization in second language learning.