A Study Of Interlanguage Fossilization In English Writing Of Non-english Majors

In1972, the famous linguist Larry Selinker firstly proposed the term interlanguage in histhesis with the same title. This term was used to refer to a non-continuouslanguage system between the native language and the target language. It takes the motherlanguage as the starting point and gradually approaches the target language. It is the dynamiclanguage system constructed by the language learners. In addition, Selinker firstly proposedthe "fossilization" in his interlanguage theory, which is the main feature of interlanguage.Fossilization is the phenomenon that linguistic items, rules and subsystems of speakers of aparticular native language tend to persist in their interlanguage relative to a particular targetlanguage. The age of learners and the amount of input they are exposed to have node-fossilizing effect. Interlanguage fossilization has been the focus of research in the field ofsecond language acquisition. It is a common phenomenon in the second language acquisitionand it is also an important characteristic of second language acquisition which is differentfrom the first language acquisition.Writing is the embodiment of the comprehensive skills of students’ language. It is there-creation process based on the language knowledge which students have learned. What’smore, it is also an important form to reflect the students’ communicative ability. But there aresome errors which appear repeatedly in the college students’ writing. Even if learners haveaccumulated a lot of basic grammatical and lexical knowledge, the students’ writing abilityremains stagnant. It is the reflection of the interlanguage fossilization in English writing.This paper reviews the related theories of interlanguage and interlanguage fossilizationas well as the research literatures on fossilization. At the same time, the researcher has studiedthe interlanguage fossilization in Chinese college students’ English writing. In addition, thestudents’ errors in English writing are sampled. All the students come from the second gradeof Hebei Engineering University, and then the researcher classifies and analyzes the errorsfrom the dimension of morphology, vocabulary, syntax, punctuation and rhetoric in order tofind out the frequency and distribution of errors committed by students. Furthermore, data areanalyzed by means of statistics to investigate the amount of errors and explore the causes ofinterlanguage fossilization in college students’ English writing. Based on the analysis on data of errors for each type, it is concluded that vocabulary errors are the first rank, syntax errorsare the second, and morphology errors rank the third. It demonstrates that language transferand training transfer are the two main reasons to cause interlanguage fossilization inSelinker’s five central processes about causes of fossilization. The rhetoric is the last rank. Itdoesn’t mean the students have acquired it very well so that there are only five errors amongall of the writing samples. In fact, the students don’t acquire it at all and they don’t know howto apply it in the writing. So they avoid applying rhetoric in their compositions in order not tocommit errors. Therefore, the researcher should not draw conclusions based on the statisticsonly. Statistics should be integrated with the practical teaching so as to draw the exact andscientific conclusion. Based on this, the researcher proposes the implications and learningstrategies to reduce interlanguage fossilization in Chinese college students’ English writing. Itis helpful to reduce interlanguage fossilization in English writing teaching and improvestudents’ English writing ability, too.