A Study On Language Fossilization Of Non-English Majors

Fossilization is the phenomenon that linguistic items,rules and subsystems of speakers of a particular NL tend to persist in their IL relative to a particular TL.The age of the learners and the amount of input they are exposed to have no defossilizing effect Now that fossilization is a vital obstacle for ESL/EFL learners' continual and stable development of their interlanguage,it has become one of the heated studying focuses in the SLA field.On the basis of former studies and researches at home and abroad,most of the existed studies on fossilization only restricted to language aspects,while few studies on pragmatic fossilization.In this thesis,in order to analyze fossilization not only from language respects,but also from a pragmatic perspective,an empirical study is conducted.First,an investigation was carried out by making error analysis among non-English majors' Chinese-English translations in different levels,analyzing the causes of lexical and grammatical fossilization;second,a questionnaire integrated with an interview are conducted to analyze the causes of pragmatic fossilization in the process of foreign language study.According to the analysis of causes,some tentative implications were put forward to reduce or avoid fossilization that can make foreign language teaching and learning more effective.The paper is made up of six chapters.Chapter one is introduction.Chapter two focuses on the literature review of fossilization and its theoretical basis—interlanguage. Chapter three is research methodology,an empirical study is conducted.And data are collected by means of translations,questionnaire and interviews.Chapter four has analyzed the causes of lexical and grammatical fossilization and put forward some implications for English teaching.Chapter five has analyzed the causes of pragmatic fossilization and put forward some implications for English teaching.Chapter six is conclusion.