Hi, Mohammad,

I've spent several years tutoring both native English speakers as well as ESL students and have found that often they are similar in the case of these fossilized errors. Many individuals tend to have those specific grammatical or typographical mistakes that continuously crop up in their writing. One thing I've found that helps (and this has helped me in my own writing as well) is to keep track of the mistakes you are prone to make (e.g., replacing "lose" with "loose") in a spreadsheet or document and then every time you complete a paper or piece of writing check it against that document that contains your likely mistakes. This can often force a student to go back through their work with a critical eye that might otherwise be lacking and hopefully eventually cause them to see these mistakes during the writing process instead of afterwards or not at all.

Hope this helps,

Ben

Dear Mohammed,

I agree with Benjamin about correcting fossilized errors in written English.  If it isn't too much work or if you have individual classes, you can even create an error file with the student and go over their written work with them and very gently encourage them to find their mistakes based on the past mistakes that have been recorded.  If the student is motivated, you will see rapid improvement.

Fossilized mistakes are more difficult to eliminate in oral expression and require patience on the part of both the teacher and student who must also have an enormous desire to improve.  Once the mistake is isolated, this doesn't mean the student can correct it in a normal conversation.  It is best to correct one mistake at a time and give them exercises that they might do a few minutes every day at home.   

The longer the person has been speaking the language the more difficult it is to rectify the situation.

    Good luck,

    Sarah

Dear Benjamin and Sarah, thank you very much for your comments. Making an error file for each student is a good suggestion...

The person with fossilized speech has a network of neurons already set up that are devoted to that particular (incorrect) sound. You have to make the person aware of this, so he can then set up a new (correct) competing network.

How? I frequently make the person: say it wrong, try to say it right, say it wrong, try to say it right, back and forth a few times. This helps him to become aware of the network he has set up, and teaches him to distinguish between the old neuronal network and the new neuronal network. For example, the person (in China) is pronouncing "bin' like "bean." So you write on a piece of paper both words and have him say both, demonstrating the difference.

(Also, of course, you need to teach correct mouth, lips, jaw and tongue positions. Is the tongue relaxed or tense? Where is the tonque? What is the shape of the tongue? How are the lips shaped? etc.)

Or they are saying "sank you" instead of "thank you". Write them both down and go back and forth a few times. Thank, sank, thank, sank, thank, sank...

When you ask the person to say it wrong and he or she says it right, you know you are making progress. Keep it up, and if you have got their jaw, tongue, lips, etc. educated, they will eventuallly say it right.    

Mohammad: Fossilised errors in language learning can be defined as routine (vocal) behaviour. If and when this behaviour impairs communication, correcting these errors means having the learners adopt a different set of fossilised habits, those described as “targets” or “correct” forms in FL/SL teaching materials.

This can be difficult for pronunciation, as Sarah notes, and I agree with Bill that raising physical awareness of both the mistake and the target is the way to go, though I doubt it that writing can play a useful role in this: speech and print are quite different linguistic modes.

If your focus, like mine, is pronunciation, these resources may help:

‘Vocal versatility and vocal fossilisation’

http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/09/vocal-versatility-and-vocal.html

‘Multilingual accents’ (blog post):

http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/09/multilingual-accents.html

‘Multilingual accents’ (journal article):

http://www.academia.edu/922853/Multilingual_accents

Lastly, the preference for printed forms of language in FL/SL teaching materials and the consequent failure of these materials to address linguistic prosody certainly is to blame, in my view, for “fossilised” spoken outcomes. Have a look here, ‘Rhythm clues and glues’, particularly at Carolyn Graham’s “jazz chants” rationale and methodology:

http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2013/05/rhythm-clues-and-glues.html

Madalena

First of all, it is inevtable that students will have some errors as they go through interlanguage period. If the students have not received sufficient input or the teacher has not created some awareness towards the errors, they get fossilized by the time. Can we avoid it? Certainly no! However,  it does not mean that they cannot be repaired or rectified. If a student's attention is drawn on the error, first student will realize that it is an error and then repairement process will start. By the way, the repairement process may take longer depending on how often that item is used in production either written or oral. Creating awareness individually and providing right amount of input with appropriate motivation will help the student repair it by the time. The teacher should be patient enough so that the student will acquire or digest the new input and use it appropriately.   As Sarah stated, a teacher can create an error file for each student and deal with them by using appropriate error repairement techniques. It takes time, needs patience and perseverance.

Dear all,

Bill Lauritzen, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira and Turan Paker

Your answers, comments and suggestions are very much appreciated.

For writing classes, I have collected sentences with typical sentence structure errors over the years and I give the students several sentences and figure out how to change it to get a better version. As has been said, awareness is the first step and this exercise helps them to get aware of their problems. I post the sentences on our discussion board and they work together on the sentences, but you can also print them out and let students work in groups.

For pronunciation problems, I let students listen to recordings, shadow read them, record themselves, listen to their recording and compare with the original one, then post it to our discussion board and comment on the recordings of three peers. I've called this method peer-reviewed pronunciation reading (PPR) and just published two articles about the results, one comparing with control group that didn't use the method and the other comparing groups that used PPR with/without feedback from  the teacher. Result was, that students doing PPR improved more than students not using this method and the second one showed that it didn't matter if the teacher was giving additional feedback. What mattered, however, was how many comments they gave to their classmates. That means, once they became aware of the problems of their classmates, they also became aware of their own problems. Here is a link to these publications:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Beate_Luo/contributions?ev=prf_act

If you have problems retrieving them, contact me.

I just had students record themselves and do error analysis with their own work, rather than having them submit to peer scrutiny. I help them through errors that are egregious that they flat out don't notice. This has always been a successful and interesting routine. 

Thank you all for your contrbutions

Dear Beate Luo, your method for pronunciation problems is really good. I also agree with your statement " once they became aware of the problems of their classmates, they also became aware of their own problems". I had a look at your publication. It is quite helpful.

Reagrds

Dear Mary Frances Rice, thanks for your interest in my question but I would like to know the strategy that you follow when the students do error analysis with their own work.

Dear Mary, I have done that before, and though it is helpful, students do better when there is peer review. When they just hand in their work to the teacher, many of them do not really give their best, but if they know their classmates will listen, they put more effort in their work. They improved much more since I introduced peer review.

i think you need to find a way of getting the TL input (English) into l2 students body so that students recognise how the tl items are different from what ever it is in their mother tongue. these need to be accessed by L2 students through perception and intense bodily reconditioning. I use a method called somatically enhanced approach. you can find it on Academia edu. Let me know what you think.

Dear Felicia Zhang,

Thank you for your contribution

I agree with you. We should pay their attention to the fact that TL and L1 are different from each other in terms of syntax, phonetics....etc. Determining such differences between L1 and TL help students to see clearly some of the problems they might face. They may avoid making such errors if they are completely aware of the possible difficult areas. Making L2 learners aware of cross-linguistic differences might be of assistance with certain difficulties in the TL.