NOVA ANGELA P. BARRETTO
Bachelor of Arts in English Language Studies
Isabela State University-Cauayan Campus
Abstract
It is probably true to say that most learners of a foreign or second language fail to achieve their aim of native-speaker-like proficiency due to an inability to permanently correct persistent errors. This condition has become known as fossilization. That led the researcher to study and investigate Fossilization in Second Language Learning of AB-English students from Isabela State University Cauayan City, Campus.
This research first obtained errors in the outputs from their Creative Writing Class. For these errors to be determined as fossilized errors, a grammar test was also given to the same class as a form of triangulation. Furthermore, the participants were also interviewed about their learning strategies for second language acquisition and their coping strategies. The errors are then classified based on Selinker’s division of the different kinds of fossilization.
Fossilization in Second Language Acquisition is complex. An important strength of this study, therefore, is its qualitative-employing multiple case study approach, which is appropriate for complex and vague phenomena such as fossilization. The qualitative-descriptive approach enabled the researcher to find not only what they had suspected beforehand, but to reveal several new aspects of Fossilization in Second Language Acquisition, which the other researchers had not been aware of before.