Abstract:
This study investigates the fossilization and defossilization in the developing interlanguage of ESL students. The subjects were a group of 13 Japanese SL learners who studied at a U. S. University in an exchange program during 1994-95. The students' use of copula, auxiliaries, morphemes and syntactic structures was examined to see the degree to which there were interlanguage changes during the period. A close examination of SL production in form-focused contexts indicates that fossilized errors are more likely to occur when a number of particular conditions are not satisfied, involving a relatively automatized system of conveying meaning, an easy control of topic and a high degree of understanding of the target linguistic structure.