Abstract:
The present paper has two-fold aim. First, it sheds light on the nature of fossilization, its main sources and causes, and ways of avoiding it. Second, it examines some examples of fossilization drawn from students' oral performance. The data of the study are drawn from students' oral performance while communicating with their EFL teachers; the data are based on actual observation while attending classes with teachers of English. The problem of this study rises from the fact that teachers of English in most cases know the pronunciation and grammatical rules of English, but when they come to the actual experience of expressing themselves or explaining certain ideas in English, they sometimes violate the rules and speak broken English. So do the students who seem to understand the grammatical points they have learnt, yet they commit the same errors in their written and spoken English. This observation motivated the author to examine this problem.