A Study Of Lexical Fossilization In English Writing Of English Majors

The concept of fossilization is first put forward by Selinker (1972). The phenomenon of fossilization isthat after learning a foreign language to a certain extent, the language level of the majority of learners areno longer as improved as steadily as the initial stages of learning, but in a state of stagnation wandering andunable to reach the ideal proficiency of target language.In the past three decades of the20thcentury, many scholars abroad probed into the definition andvariables of fossilization from various perspectives and conducted large amount of empirical researches onit. However, at home, fossilization researches have started relatively late and just remain in the state ofintroducing foreign theories of fossilization. Chinese researchers do not pay enough attention to theempirical studies of fossilization until1990s. The phenomenon of fossilization is easy to occur in theintermediate and advanced learners, so the thesis chooses the lower grades and higher grades students ofEnglish major as informants and their lexical errors in English compositions as entry point to explore thelexical fossilization.First, the paper reviews the researches on interlanguage and fossilization. Then based on the theoryof Error Analysis and interlanguage fossilization, the paper tries to make a tentative investigation of thelexical fossilization phenomenon in English majors’ English writings. The study adopts pseudo-longitudinalapproach and combines the quantitative and qualitative research, proposing the following researchquestions:(1) Does lexical fossilization exist among English majors in Northwest Normal University? If yes, whichcategory of errors fossilized most obviously?(2) Does lexical fossilization exist in CLEC? If yes, which category of errors fossilized most obviously?(3) Does lexical fossilization of NWNU and CLEC have the similar tendency?(4) What are the causes for the lexical fossilization?After analyzing the collected English writing of English majors from Northwest Normal University(NWNU), the author tries to classify the fossilized lexical errors and finds the regularity of the distributionand frequency of fossilized lexical errors. Then in order to test the commonality of lexical fossilization, theauthor seeks the aid from the sub-corpora st5(English majors in lower grades) and st6(English majors inhigher grades) of Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). The frequencies of fossilized lexical errors arealso calculated. Last, the author did the Paired Samples T-Test by means of Statistic Package for Social Science (SPSS). Although there are differences on the frequency of lexical errors between two groups ofdata, the results have proved there is no significant difference on the lexical errors appeared incompositions of between the lower grades and higher grades. According to the above research, the thesiscould get the conclusion as follows:1. Lexical fossilization exists among English majors in NWNU, the word spelling, nouns, verbs,prepositions and pronouns errors fossilized more obviously.2. Lexical fossilization exists in CLEC, the word spelling, nouns, verbs, collocation and adjectiveerrors fossilized more obviously.3. The lexical fossilization of NWNU and CLEC has the similar tendency.4. Some factors for the lexical fossilization included negative transfer of mother tongue, lack ofquality input of the target language, inappropriate learning strategy, lack of effective feedback anddifferent cultures and so on.However, there are still limitations in this study. First, there must be some inappropriateness in theprocess of author’s correcting compositions due to different person. Second, in some cases it is difficult todistinguish the error and mistake. Last, the thesis just puts forward some factors for fossilized lexical errorsthrough questionnaires, but no further teaching experiment is implemented to testify these factors.