Two of the topics that come up again and again in the field of Second Language Learning are “interlanguage” and “fossilisation”. I think an understanding of the implications of the theory of interlanguage, and thinking about how we can fight against and even remedy fossilisation, is a crucial step in helping us language learners progress through challenging stages in our development, and I’d like to suggest a 5-step strategy today.
First a little background on the theory. The terms “interlanguage” and “fossilisation” were coined by Larry Selinker back in 1972 to try and offer an alternative explanation to behaviourist accounts at the time of why we continue to make certain errors at different stages in our linguistic development. The notion of interlanguage describes the process of language learning as ongoing and personal, where we intuit and develop our own rules for a new language over time (e.g. grammatical, morphosyntactic, phonological, etc), given all the clues in our environment around us and experiences interacting with other speakers. At each stage in our development of a new language, we look for similarities with other systems we already know well, as well as starker contrasts, and add all the evidence together to form a new emerging system called an interlanguage. This interlanguage contains rules we know well from our native language, new rules we believe are used in the target language, and other more general or logical principles that seem to cover most languages and forms of communication.
This little salad of rules and ideas is constantly being tossed around through metalinguistic introspection, and integration with new experiences and knowledge, depending on the motivation and goals of the learner on each occasion. With each new stage and personal interlanguage that evolves, we ideally move closer to or approximate the target language, removing some rules, and adding or amending others. As Selinker (1972) puts it:
“Successful language-learning, for most learners, is the reorganization of linguistic material from an IL [interlanguage] to identify with a particular TL [target language].
One of the biggest problems is the issue of fossilisation. Sometimes we just hit a hurdle in our grammar or pronunciation on this road to advancing in a language, and don’t seem to progress any further in the direction of approximating a near-native speaker (or have stalled en route to one of our original goals). It’s as though we’ve reached a level where we’re comfortable communicating in our established interlanguage, and as others don’t seem to object too much, it’s good enough for many learners.
Other language learners, however, feel frustrated that they just can’t get over a particular hurdle, or are saddened by the realisation that they don’t even notice the differences between their current speech or writing and that of native speakers anymore. We look for answers to how we can best “fix” these errors, or at least start noticing them again, well aware that we’ve probably practised and reinforced them hundreds if not thousands of times over many years, and now filter out or gloss over much of what we hear and see around us through our established perspectives and personal interlingual set of rules. So what can we do? Is there little or no hope once we reach this stage, for perhaps we’ve walked too long or far down a different path to change now?
The good news is that we do manage to improve all the time, even if it’s too small to notice on a day to day basis, and this progress is testified to by so many second language learners who have moved to their target language country and immersed there for several years. We also learn our first language to a very advanced “native” level, and although this is largely up for debate with innatists and strict advocates of the Critical Period Hypothesis, I think there’s every hope of advancing onwards to near-native levels as an adult too, as long as it’s accompanied by the right approach, attitude, and some serious investment of time and effort.
I’ve tried several different techniques on myself over the years, as well as tried to help others who have come to me to improve an aspect of their English as a second language. I can initially tell you what hasn’t worked particularly well but I thought should have worked at the time (of course, others may have had more positive experiences here): constructive criticism, explanations, drills, massive comprehensible input, and recasting (i.e. repeating the phrase correctly in a more subtle non-corrective manner afterwards as part of the dialogue).
I know one person for example who keeps making slips in the dative case, and even though they know exactly what they’re doing wrong each time they say it, they continue to make the same errors. Like a child who has been corrected or received subtle recasting hundreds of times in conversation, in addition to hearing the correct grammatical constructions said all around them across thousands of hours, the errors still seem stuck in their interlanguage for some of the trickier items, much like little fossils preserved forever in stone. Something else is missing, and these cases are not an exception in my experience. So here is what I suggest and have found works exceptionally well:
How to beat fossilisation
1. Independently notice the error.
Simply being told isn’t enough; you need to see or hear it for yourself and make it personal.
2. Really believe it is an error.
Perhaps the person who told you this is misinformed, or maybe there are other occasions when you’re interlingual rule could be right. You won’t be able to get to the next stage until you really believe that everyone else around you is saying or writing your construction in a different way than you.
3. Want to change.
Is it really that important to change your interlanguage at this stage? There’s no denying that it will take time and effort to fix what could be a small and insignificant error, and perhaps the return on investment is too low to worth bothering after 20 years of comfortable immersion. If you’re going to change, you need to see that it’s relevant and useful in your life, and then really commit to this goal to change.
4. Attach a strong emotional memory to some aspect of the error or the scenario in which it usually occcurs.
This for me is a crucial element, which is often left out of the process of change, and something I stumbled on through trial and error one day. It effectively raises a mental warning flag every time you’re about to use a similar construction and helps prevent the learner from making the same mistake again.
For example, I know someone who used to repeat the same mistake time and time again and say, “I need to turn the aircon on *back*“, rather than, “I need to turn the aircon back on“. I can see how the word “aircon” primes the next word in this case, and how the sentence could be perfectly delivered without the addition of the word “back”. However, no amount of recasting or comprehensible input seemed to help.
The big breakthrough came when I suggested that they picture some streaky bacon caught in the aircon and fluttering in the breeze when they switched in “back on” (bac(k)…on…aha…you see what I’m doing here 😉 ). It seemed silly at first and just made them laugh at the time, but I’ve recently spoken to them again, and they say they amazingly never made that error again, and it was all largely down to this amusing image that helped them flag the scenario.
5. Aim to produce the correct version more often than the incorrect version.
If you’ve mispronounced a word a thousand times, I’m not going to lie, it’s going to be a struggle to change it. It’s simply a battle of statistics. You’re effectively going to have two competing paradigms in your head, and the one that is more automatised is going to win each time, that is unless you make a special effort to police your actions and seek out the weaker alternative (this is where the flag in stage [4] above comes in real handy!).
The good news is that this gets easier with time, as one model of production is used more often over an earlier model, and consequently grows in automaticity and strength. For example, I mistakenly pronounced the stress in the Russian word /’надеюсь/ (I hope) for many years without even realising it. When I learnt I was saying it wrong, and made a concerted effort to change thereafter, the new pronunciation still sounded weird for a very long time. Now it’s the other way round, and I can’t imagine pronouncing the word any other way than /на’деюсь/. So it will take time for a new rule or idea to sink in and become established, especially given any former strong competition, but you’ll get there in the end just as I did, and then it will feel quite natural and require little or no effort to reproduce.
I hope this series of 5 steps can help more of you language learners out there with any ongoing difficulties with fossilisation, or at least shed some more light on the issues involved, as I know they’ve really helped me and others several times in the past, and personally continue to provide a positive framework for beating fossilisation in my own studies.
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