A Study Of Fossilization On Teacher Talk Among College English Teachers

Interlanguage fossilization is a heated topic in second language acquisition researches as well as in foreign language learning studies. It is universally believed that fossilization has been a big obstacle for language learners to achieve native language competence. Up to now, studies on fossilization has been and will be the focus of researchers, linguists and English teachers.The concept of"fossilization"has been put forward by Selinker (1972). Since the term comes into being, both researchers and linguists begin to do various researches on it and they have contributed a lot both in theory and pedagogy. However, compared with theoretical work, empirical studies are less and also later in time. Chinese researchers focus on the introduction or conclusion of theories on fossilization, and many of them are trying to explain causes to it based on the western literature.From large quantity of researches on fossilization, studies concerning fossilization on teacher talk are rarely found. It is hypothesed that college English teachers will fossilize in their teacher talk in spite of their large exposure to target language, since they are second or foreign language learners. Based on this hypothesis, the proposed investigation aims to testify whether teacher talk is fossilized through the authentic performance of teachers in class. To enhance the validity and reliability of the current thesis, a corpus has been selected as the source of material, consisting of 15 teachers'actual performance. Within the corpus, the 15 teachers cover both genders, various ages (including novice teachers, middle-aged teachers and experienced teachers) and three different universities, thus the corpus is representative.Based on the above, the present study aims to reveal the actual fossilized tendency in terms of vocabulary and structure in teacher talk. The first step in the study is to collect data of words and structures in terms of frequency according to the operational definition in the current investigation. After analyzing the data based on the material, it is certain that under the criterion of frequency, teacher talk has fossilized tendency. The second step is to expose the fossilized tendency of words with the help of software Range. Results show that in terms of part of speech, verbs are the easiest words to fossilize, and then pronouns, nouns, adjectives, conjunctions and adverbs follow verbs. The next step is to reveal fossilized tendency based on the structure in teacher talk. Counting the frequency of structures, there is no advanced methods but only collecting by hands. Under this, results show that in terms of structure, statement fragments are the easiest structure to fossilize, and then personal pronoun + lexical verb phrases, verb phrases, yes-no and wh-question fragments, (prep+) noun phrases, compound sentences and other expressions. With these results, the problems stated have been answered.After revealing the actual fossilized items in teacher talk, the research also puts forward possible causes of fossilization and gets some implications for teachers as counter measures to fossilization to study English, namely: reduce the negative transfer of L1, reinforce their awareness of fossilization, increase their comprehensible input, and promote teachers motivation of learning English. Nevertheless, studying fossilization of teacher talk is beneficial both to their language proficiency and teaching.