A Study Of Lexical Fossilization In English Writing Of High School Student

In the process of second language learning,learners frequently encounter problems that are difficult to break through,it is no longer improving as in the initial period after a certain degree of learning in the foreign language,the fossilization phenomenon will appear.Selinker(1972)first proposed the concept of fossilization in 1970 s.In the 20 th century,scholars of interlanguage theory discussed this definition and performed a large amount of empirical studies on the fossilization phenomenon from various perspectives in many studies abroad.However,the research on the fossilization phenomenon started relatively late at home,and it only focus on the introduction and discussion of the existing foreign fossilization theory,without further exploration.In other words,Chinese scholars didn't attach importance to the fossilization phenomenon in the early 20 th century,only began the empirical study on the fossilization phenomenon until 1990 s.Writing has always been an important way of examining various examinations.It is used to test students' mastery of the target language.Writing is also a focus of the examination.Although the teaching of English writing in middle schools has always been a major difficulty in teaching and its always been a focus for teachers and students.the overall effect of teaching is not obvious,and there is no great progress and breakthrough.In the teaching of English writing in high school in China,teachers found that the repeated problems recurring in student's writing,even though it has been corrected,such phenomenon belongs to fossilization of interlanguage.Fossilization phenomenon occurs easily in intermediate and advanced learners,therefore in this paper,lexical errors in senior middle school students in English writing have been selected as the cut-in point of exploration to discuss the lexical fossilization phenomenon.First of all,this paper reviews the theory of interlanguage and the lexical fossilization phenomenon.And it carries out preliminary discussion on the lexical fossilization phenomenon in English according to the perspectives of interlanguage theory,fossilization theory and error analysis theory and so on.The article proposes the following research questions through a series of investigation and research:(1)Is there lexical fossilization phenomenon in English learners at Yushe vocational middle school?(2)If the answer is yes,What are the fossilization phenomenon is there in English writing for English learners at Yushe vocational middle school?(3)What are the main causes of the lexical fossilization phenomenon?The author attempted to classify the lexical fossilization phenomenon through the analysis of English writing for English learners in Yushe vocational middle school,and has found the regular pattern of distribution and frequency.Although there is difference in the lexical error frequency of two sets of data,but the result shows that there is no significant difference in lexical errors between the junior and the senior groups.Based on the data analysis obtained from the above experiments,the following conclusions are drawn:1.There are fossilization phenomenon in English writing for English learners at Yushe vocational middle school.2.The fossilization phenomenon including nouns,verbs,prepositions,adjectives and pronoun errors,etc.3.On the basis of analyzing student composition and questionnaires,the author tried to summarize the causes of the lexical fossilization.They are native language transfer,lack of proper lexical input,learning strategies,feedback effects,and over-generalization of the target language,etc.Based on the analysis of the results of the lexical fossilization in middle school English writing,the author puts forward some teaching countermeasures: to improve the input quality of the target language;to create opportunities for language output and improve the quality of output;to use a variety of error correction strategies.However,the paper have some limitations in this research.Firstly,there are someinevitably inappropriate in the process of error correction process by the author.Secondly,it is difficult to distinguish between errors and mistakes under certain circumstances.Furthermore,the actual situation cannot be fully reflected due to the limited time and people in the researching period.Finally,this paper only proposed some error factors for the lexical fossilization through questionnaires,and no further teaching experiments are carried out to verify these factors.