The Studies Of The Types And The Causes Of Interlanguage Fossilization And Its Countermeasures

It's universally acknowledged that language fossilization has become a big obstacle for L2 learners to be very successful in their language learning or acquisition. That's the very case with the Chinese learners of English: their speaking sounds like foreign, in that their accent, word choice, or grammatical features distinguish them from native speakers; most of them, despite continuous exposure to language input and consistent efforts, become caught up somewhere in the learning process and find themselves unable to progress toward the target language (TL); even some advanced learners have backslid in their language competence. It's just these annoying facts that have appealed to the author's attention and that she has tried to probe into fossilization again.In the light of the deficiency in the previous studies abroad and home: there's no definite and adequate description about fossilization, the author tries to classify the fossilization of Chinese learners of English according to the theories of general linguistics and pragmatics, based on the qualitative analysis of the collected data through a wide survey. It has also been found out that the fossilization is pervasive into each level of English system, that is, phonetic, morphological, syntactic, discourse, semantic and pragmatic. Further, the author generalizes the major categories and manifestations of fossilization at each level. For instances, in phonology, the Chinese learners tend to confuse long vowels and shortvowels, to make wrong stress and to speak in the "foreign accent"; the major fossilizations manifest as the "coinage" at the derivational category of morphology and as "pseudo-subject" at the syntactic level, while they are primarily manifested out to be the "assumed synonym" in lexical relations, and to be the "circular pattern" in the category of discourse pattern, which is conspicuously influenced by the Chinese thinking; while in real communication, the learners are intended to abuse some complete sentences and apply the patterns or ways for ML(mother language) social behaviors into TL situations in the mechanical way, primarily because of their inadequate knowledge of TL culture and their deficient pragmatic knowledge. Due to the complexity of fossilization and the restricted research method, this classification may not be exhaustive.On the basis of the classification, the author discusses the fossilization causes from the perspectives of cognitive psychology and pragmatics. According to the results of analysis, the contributing causal variables to fossilization have been grouped into three types, i.e. interlingual, intralingual and extralingual, of which the interlingual, exactly, the negative language transfer comes to be primary. And some proper measures have been proposed to reduce the fossilization, in accordance with the influence of these factors on each level of language. As for the effects of these measures, further empirical studies need to be conducted in future.