A Study Of Lexical Fossilization In English Writing Of College Students

Interlanguage and fossilization were firstly proposed by the British linguist Selinker in 1969.He believed that 95% of the second language learners would become fossilized and their language could not reach the same level as the natives.Interlanguage is common in the process of second language acquisition and the research on interlanguage has always been the focus in the field of second language acquisition,which has attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad.Among the studies of interlanguage,fossilization is also a hot topic for scholars,and foreign scholars have carried out a lot of researches on it.However,domestic studies on fossilization of interlanguage start relatively late and mainly focus on the introduction,evaluation and verification of the theories of foreign research,which do not form its own independent,perfect and influential theory,so as to help the Chinese second language learners construct a theoretical system to delay the fossilization of interlanguage.As for the teaching of college English writing in China,there have been many teachers reflecting that some repetitive errors appear in the composition of students,even if being corrected,it will still occur once more so that the writing has been stagnant.As the basis of writing,vocabulary learning plays an important role in improving writing ability.At the same time,fossilization of the words will hinder the improvement of writing.Based on the lexical errors in college students' English writing,as well as the observation and thinking of the stagnation of writing ability,this paper explores the lexical fossilization in college English writing and raises the following questions:(1)Does lexical fossilization exist in college English writing?(2)What is the specific distribution of lexical fossilization?(3)What are the factors leading to lexical fossilization as well as the strategies to avoid lexical fossilization?Through the study and analysis of the collected English compositions and aquestionnaire,this paper has the following findings:(1)In the English writings of college students,there is indeed the appearance of lexical fossilization.(2)Through the analysis of students' compositions,the author finds lexical fossilization appears among each part of speech and lists the specific distribution of it.(3)Based on the analysis of the questionnaire,the author tries to draw the main factors attributing to lexical fossilization: lack of awareness of lexical fossilization,negative transfer of mother tongue,lack of appropriate target language input,improper learning strategies,insufficient feedback,as well as lack of learning motivation and overgeneralization of the target language.In the last part of this thesis,the author puts forward some suggestions on how to improve the vocabulary teaching according to the causes of lexical fossilization:reducing the negative transfer of mother tongue,providing qualified input of target language and strengthening the writing feedback.The analysis of the causes of lexical fossilization provides a new way to eliminate the lexical fossilization and improve the writing ability.At the same time,the research of this paper also has some reference for further improving the teaching of college English writing in Chinese environment.