Re: Does early speaking lead to fossilized mistakes?
Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 6:45 pm
While this whole discussion is pretty interesting, I'm afraid it is getting quite far from the original point.
-a few weeks/months long learning process is not that much, not enough. I trully don't think fossilization is possible within such a timeframe. Repeated mistakes yes, we tend to make mistakes more than once. But not fossils that resist tons of correction both from others and self-correction. It takes time to get so used to a mistake.
-Fossilization clearly needs a different bit of definition, such as the extent of the mistake, and I haven't seen it clearly in the whole thread and quotes. Sure, someone can have a fossilized trouble concerning one word, while another concerns a whole grammar point. What is being drawn into this discussion are the forever intermediate learners, who don't get further than that level for whatever reason. Really, does not learning half the language count as a fossilized mistake? People who despite the immersion program in Canada suck at French, probably because they never really needed to learn it or because of any of the million possible reasons? Those have nothing to do with it. In such cases, a fossilized wrong detail doesn't matter at all.
-What does the comparison of natives and non-natives have to to do with fossilization? This has already been discussed a hundred times.
-I still think the part of the discussion that explored the issue the best happened around reineke's quotes concerning output beyond the student's knowledge. The more I think about it, the more I consider it important. All those beginners looking for exchange partners to just talk. All those teachers valuing the ability to circumvent an unknown bit too much. All the coursebooks chopping grammar into too small bites, without telling the student "hey, this is not the universal rule, be patient".
-a few weeks/months long learning process is not that much, not enough. I trully don't think fossilization is possible within such a timeframe. Repeated mistakes yes, we tend to make mistakes more than once. But not fossils that resist tons of correction both from others and self-correction. It takes time to get so used to a mistake.
-Fossilization clearly needs a different bit of definition, such as the extent of the mistake, and I haven't seen it clearly in the whole thread and quotes. Sure, someone can have a fossilized trouble concerning one word, while another concerns a whole grammar point. What is being drawn into this discussion are the forever intermediate learners, who don't get further than that level for whatever reason. Really, does not learning half the language count as a fossilized mistake? People who despite the immersion program in Canada suck at French, probably because they never really needed to learn it or because of any of the million possible reasons? Those have nothing to do with it. In such cases, a fossilized wrong detail doesn't matter at all.
-What does the comparison of natives and non-natives have to to do with fossilization? This has already been discussed a hundred times.
-I still think the part of the discussion that explored the issue the best happened around reineke's quotes concerning output beyond the student's knowledge. The more I think about it, the more I consider it important. All those beginners looking for exchange partners to just talk. All those teachers valuing the ability to circumvent an unknown bit too much. All the coursebooks chopping grammar into too small bites, without telling the student "hey, this is not the universal rule, be patient".