Fossilization in the Language Learning Process (and how you can prevent this from happening)
Hi everyone! I am starting my medium journey on the topics of applied linguistics, language learning, and etymology with a subject about which every language learner is concerned and has a risk. It is “interlanguage” and "fossilization."
Before I start explaining these terms, I want to ask a question. Think of a language learner from the Middle East or Asia and guess that this person is learning English, which is from a different language family and has completely different syntactic, phonological, and morphological structures. What would you expect to happen—a completely new language? In short, no. But if we extend this answer, the answer will carry a probability. Learning a second or foreign language may cause a mixture between your native language and the second or foreign language. For example, Turkish and English are two languages that have enormous distinctions in terms of syntax. Turkish is an agglutinative language, which means it has a kind of suffix for every tense, meaning, adverb, etc., and there can be more than one suffix in one word. In contrast, in English, there are no suffixes to indicate tenses but auxiliary verbs. That is why, while speaking English, a native Turkish person can confuse the syntactic features and produce an English sentence in the syntactic structure of the Turkish language. For example, one can say “I going” instead of using the auxiliary verb “am” because there is no word that meets the meaning of the aux. verb “am.”
In linguistics, this is called "interlanguage,” and this term was first coined by a linguist, Larry Selinker, in 1972. Interlanguage, according to Selinker, is a second language learner's idiolect that incorporates their native language's syntactic elements and is developing as long as the learner is developing his or her second language.
Another factor or result, called "fossilization,” is an occurrence that can be explained as the permanence of an input. When you learn something (it can be words, phrases, word orders, grammar, pronounciation, and the other features or elements of a language), the language elements become permanent in your memory, and while you are trying to produce a sentence, your brain recalls those learned elements without asking if they are somehow correct. If you learn a grammatical rule wrong, it has the probability of staying like this forever (if not fixed right at the time of learning). Your brain recalls these fossilized concepts and produces a sentence that is true to you. The relation between fossilization and interlanguage is that you assume or learn a concept and consider the new input (the different feature of the target language) as the same as your current knowledge of your native language, and this becomes permanent in your brain (fossilization). This confusion is called "interlanguage.”
I hope I made everything clear and easy to understand for you all. 😅 See you soon in a new article. Take care!