Research On The English Lexical Attrition Of Junior Middle School Students And Countermeasures

Language attrition refers to the process that learners progressively weaken their language ability owing the reduction of language use over a period of time.Researches shows that vocabulary is the basis of language learning but the most vulnerable to attrition.But there are few empirical studies involving vocabulary attrition in China,especially the research on vocabulary attrition of junior middle school students.The research on how to overcome vocabulary attrition of junior middle school students is very important.Three questions are raised in the study:(1)Will there be vocabulary attrition for junior high school students after a two-month vacation? If so,what is the degree of attrition?(2)Do nouns,verbs,adjectives,and adverbs have the same degree of attrition,and what are the characteristics of the trend?(3)What is the correlation between vocabulary attrition and the use of vocabulary learning strategies? How to overcome vocabulary attrition?In order to explore these problems,this study adopts quantitative and qualitative methods.The subjects are 114 junior two students in Fuzhou Yingcai middle school.The attrition time is 2 months in summer vacation.The implementation process is divided into pre-test and post-test.What’s more,the author collected related data through a questionnaire of English vocabulary learning strategies,as well as an English vocabulary test and an interview.The conclusions can be seen as follows:(1)about 71% of the subjects had vocabulary attrition after stopping English learning for two months.(2)There are considerable differences in the degree of attrition among different parts of speech,among which the degree of attrition of verbs is the highest.(3)There is no association between the use of vocabulary learning strategies and the degree of vocabulary attrition.Integrated with the practical teachings of this research and the results of the analysis,we can get some suggestions.For teachers,they should increase the frequency of students’ contact with English vocabulary in various ways;pay attention to improving students’ consolidation and application of verb part-of-speech vocabulary;make full use of the language learning advantage of junior high school students at this age to teach English,such as strengthening students’ literacy and foreign language thinking ability.For students,when they are learning vocabulary,they should actively use effective vocabulary learning strategies,put vocabulary to use and review them in time;while memorizing vocabulary in context,they should focus on the connotation of vocabulary.