Interlanguage Fossilization In College English Writing

Interlanguage (IL) fossilization is a burning issue in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and English Language Teaching (ELT). The thesis aims to study IL fossilization in college English writing. By analyzing the errors in English writing of 92 freshmen and sophomores enrolled in 2006 and 2005 respectively majoring in civil engineering at CUMTB and comparing the learner errors of two groups—freshmen and sophomores, the paper tries to find out the common types of errors and error frequencies. The author uses the software SPSS to analyze the data. The result indicates there are no significant differences between two groups in error frequencies, thus showing the possibility of IL fossilization. The paper attempts to set up a pattern of fossilized errors to non-English major college students that word class, verb forms, spelling, and diction and collocation show high tendency of group fossilization. The paper provides an empirical research for IL fossilization study with the significance in theory and practice to some extent.