Post 87: What is interlanguage fossilization?

Post 87: What is interlanguage fossilization?

Interlanguage fossilization is when people learning a second language keep taking rules from their native language and incorrectly applying them to the second language they are learning. This results in a language system that different from both the person's native language and second language. Krashen's Monitor Hypothesis and Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis (see my posts on those theories) mention Interlanguage fossilization when the Second Language Learners tries to translates grammar rules or words or sentence patterns from his first language into his second language resulting in a in between language (interlanguage) that is neither his first language nor his second language.

I used to see a lot of Interlanguage Fossilization errors when I graded English Composition papers. Spanish native speakers learning English would make ESL errors such as "Is a good idea that we learn English" or "Is important we all learn to read" because in Spanish they do say "Es importante que nosotres apprendemos a leer". 

Japanese and Chinese do not have definite articles in their language so Chinese, Japanese writers would leave out 'the'  or put in 'the' when it is not needed. Examples are  "Sun is hot", "Book is good to read", "I read book",  "Computer has changed our lives" instead of the correct, "The sun is hot.", The book is good to read", "The book is good to read" and "The computer has changed our lives.". These errors are also known as 'transfer errors."

These transfer errors are not mistakes that native speakers of English would make. So when I grade English Composition papers, I can instantly tell who is an ESL student and who is a native speaker of English. Native speakers of English know the idiomatic difference between, "I go home" and "I go to the home". When you say, "I go to the home", that is an abbreviated form of saying, "I go to the nursing home." vs "I go home" means you are heading back to your main place of residence, your house or your apartment. Native speakers of English have trouble with sentence structure, essay structure or punctuation.  

As many ESL teachers know, these transfer errors do not just occur in writing, but they also occur in NNS (Non-native speaker) as well.  It is hard for an adult speaker to break the habit of transferring grammatical knowledge from their first language to their second language. It is very common for beginning students to speak this kind of interlanguage.  Older students are more likely to have fossilized errors than younger students. My father pronounces 'owe' as 'own' so when he means, "I owe you money', he says instead,  "I own you money". No matter how many times my mother used to correct my Chinese father, he can NEVER correct that mistake because that is his Chinese accent on his spoken English so hence the name, 'fossilization'. 

For me, having an ESL background helps me to better distinguish and give better writing feedback to my ESL students. There is a lot of overlap between what I teach in writing skills to both native speakers and to non-native speakers, but having an ESL background helps me distinguish between the two groups.

Do you grade differently ESL papers vs native speaker papers or do you grade them all the same using the same basic rubric?