A Study Of The Attrition Of English Verbs Among Chinese College Students

Since the conference on Loss of Language Skills held at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, studies on language attrition have been carried out in such linguistic levels as phonetics, vocabulary and grammar. Due to the importance of vocabulary in linguistic research and language acquisition, a great number of studies abroad have been dedicated to the attrition of vocabulary. However, language attrition studies at home are still at the stage of theory-introducing, and only a few empirical studies have been conducted on the subject of vocabulary attrition.This thesis reports an empirical study aimed at the attrition of English verbs among Chinese college students. It studies the attrition of English verbs in terms of some linguistics features, such as word length, frequency, synformy and text coverage. The subjects of the study are 104 sophomores major in Clinical Medicine and Nursing in Weifang Medical College, who have finished their English courses in June 2009 and do not learn English during the six-month interval. The verbs in Vocabulary Test are sampled from the Chinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC,2003). The findings of the study can be summarized as:(1) English verbs learned at college are more susceptible to attrition than those learned in middle school. This indicates that verbs learned later are more likely to suffer attrition than those learned earlier. (2) Longer verbs are more vulnerable to attrition than shorter ones. (3) High-frequency verbs are more resistant to attrition than low-frequency ones. (4) Synformic verbs are less resistant to attrition than non-synformic verbs. (5) Verbs of smaller text coverage are more susceptible to attrition.Based on the findings of the study, this thesis made some suggestions to help English teachers and students in vocabulary teaching, vocabulary learning and vocabulary retention:(1) In English teaching, teachers should introduce the knowledge of lexicology to students and teach them how to analyze the structures of long words and memorize them effectively. (2) Teachers should teach long, low-frequency and synformic words in various contexts. (3) Teachers should help students to master a large number of words of large text coverage in order to improve their reading comprehension and listening comprehension. (4) Students should learn English continuously and find their own ways to recite long, low-frequency and synformic words. (5) It is important for learners to frequently review the words which are susceptible to attrition.