A Study Of English Lexical Attrition Among Non-English Major/College Students

As the reverse process of language acquisition, language attrition refers to thelanguage decrease resulted from a period of language disuse by individuals, which hasbeen a heated language research field overseas since The Conference on Loss ofLanguage Skills held at the University of Pennsylvania in1980. Different from theheated empirical studies on language attrition abroad, Chinese scholars, who used topay scant attention to this issue,are still at the stage of theory introducing, thus only afew empirical studies have been conducted on the subject of language attrition.It's well-known that vocabulary is the foundation of learning a foreign language.Up to now significant research has been devoted to the study of vocabulary acquisition,however, little research effort has been addressed to the lexical attrition. This researchconsists of two steps: first, based on the theory of lexical motivation, vocabulary test isdesigned and test papers are handed out to200testees who are non-English majorscollege students from Hubei University of Technology,100sophomores and100seniorsrespectively. Then quantitative research approach is adopted to analyze the test resultand answer the following questions:(1) How do the students master all kinds of lexicalmotivation?(2) Is there a lexical attrition phenomenon among senior non-English majorstudents after they cease English learning for two years?(3) Which type of motivation isnot easy to erode and which type of motivation is more vulnerable to attrition?Through the analysis of the data based on SPSS17.0, the main findings can besummarized as follows:(1)Descriptive Statistics and Mean Value show that students`mastery of lexical motivation degree from high to low is morphological motivation,semantic motivation, etymological motivation and phonetic motivation.(2)Sig.,Sig.(2-tailed) and95%Confidence Interval of the Difference of Independent Samples T-Test indicate that the degree of lexical attrition do not achieve the desired results, butthere does exist a phenomenon of attrition.(3)Mean Difference of Independent SamplesT-Test presents that words from etymological motivation is not easy to erode, butmorphological one is more vulnerable to attrition.The above findings have practical significance on college English vocabularyteaching and learning. On one hand, during the process of teaching English vocabulary,teachers should introduce the knowledge of lexicology to students and teach them howto memorize words effectively according to different vocabulary classification. On theother hand, students should find their own learn ways to create opportunities forlanguage practice in order to avoid lexical attrition. Meanwhile, it is very important tofrequently review the words which are susceptible to attrition.