A Longitudianl Case Study On Fossilization Of English-Major Students’Interlanguage

Since the appearance of the word "fossilization" in the study of second language acquisition, it has been paid much attention by many researchers in the field of applied linguistics. It gave an exact definition to a common phenomenon which had bothered the researchers in SLA for decades, that is, many second language learners reached a plateau after studying L2 for a long time. No matter how hard they worked, they can never acquire a native-like competence in target language.The theory of fossilization was based on the concept of "interlangauge". It was put forward by Selinker (1972), who devoted decades to study the nature, the essence and the causes of this phenomenon. In his study, the theory of fossilization evolved with the development of second language acquisition theory. As far as the causes concerned, he had updates them several times. Besides this great pioneer in this field, other researchers from home and abroad also put forward different opinions and made contribution to the development of this field. Domestically speaking, numerous researchers applied Selinker’s theory to the research of the Chinese English learners and conducted lots of experiment to find out its pedagogical implication and ways of defossilization. They hope that it can help Chinese learners to skip the learning plateau appearing in their learning process.In the previous studies, for the difficulties and inconvenience of longitudinal studies, most of researchers adopted pseudo-longitudinal research instead of longitudinal research to study fossilization. Theoretically speaking, this kind of researches has some flaws in itself, especially in the analysis of the causing variables which are supposed to be inferred from the analysis of individual behaviors. In this paper, the author adopted longitudinal research as the basic way to study the nature and the causes of fossilization. Qualitative and quantitative studies are both used in the research. To study the individual and detailed behaviors of fossilization, the author chose case study as the research method which aimed to gain some micro-information about fossilization. Data were collected through written and oral tests and analyzed through SPSS. Personal interview were used to obtain more detailed information in this study. On the outset, several questions have been put forward to make the research concise and clear.Ⅰ. Is Chinese advanced English learners’ interlanguage fossilized or not? Ⅱ. What are the fossilized items in this case study?Ⅲ. Providing that the informants’interlanguage are fossilized, what are the causing variables leading to the fossilization?IV. Is explicit rule explanation or corrective feedback useful for defossilization of interlanguage?V. Which aspect of interlanguage tends to be fossilized or seemed to have been immune to the pedagogic intervention?Through painstaking calculation and analysis, the paper arrived at the following conclusion. There did exist fossilized items in the students’interlanguage. Compared with written English, oral English is more easily fossilized and more difficult to defossilze in this learning process. Among those fossilized items, phonological items are the easiest ones to be fossilized. Among those causing factors put forward by Selinker, negative language transfer and overgeneralization of target language, unfavorable strategies of second language communication, deficient input and lack of output and unfavorable learning motivation are the main factors causing fossilization. To defossilze those linguistic items, the teachers and the students should set about from those perspectives.