An Empirical Study On Attrition Predictors Of English Question For Chinese Non-english Majors

There is a widely neglected phenomenon in China:English learning is both time-consuming and costly for EFL learners; however, the learned skills will be liable to loss or forgetting after college English education, especially for learners of non-English major. A reasonable explanation for this is language attrition, which, as a field of academic research, was first recognized formally at the Conference on the Attrition of Language Skills at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980. Since this epoch-making conference, the term language attrition has widely been employed to replace loss and forgetting. Numerous studies, both theoretical and empirical, have been conducted in the domain of language attrition by researchers abroad whereas the relevant studies are like gold-dust in China.Taking English question as an example, the present study aims to investigate the characteristics of language attrition, namely English question attrition of non-English major graduates in the Chinese environment. Prior to the carry-out of the study, the involved research questions are presented in the first place:(1) Is the Regression Hypothesis able to predict the attrition sequence? If so, what is the possible attrition sequence of English question in the present study?(2) Does the attained proficiency level prior to attrition have effect on the process of language attrition?(3) What is the relationship of linguistic features between attrited language and dominant language, namely English and Chinese respectively in the present study?(4) Does the length of period of disuse have influence on language attrition?In order to solve the problems mentioned above, questionnaire is designed as a tool to collect research data. The collected data are further analyzed by means of SPSS for windows 12.0 and the present study has come to the following conclusion:(1) The Regression Hypothesis has been verified in attrition sequence of English question. For the Chinese English learners, attrition sequence of interrogative sentences does follow the "First Learned, Last Fogotten" and "Best Learned, Hardest Forgotten" pattern as predicted by the Regression Hypothesis. What's more, the achieved attrition sequence of English question is Stage 5≈/> Stage 4≈/> Stage 3 > Stage 2≈/> Stage 1 for Chinese EFL learners.(2) Language proficiency level prior to attrition has an inverse relationship with the amount and rate of question attrition in accordance with the critical threshold hypothesis(3) The degree of structural resemblance and difference between English and Chinese is approved to influence English attrition, just as linguistic feature hypothesis claims that if there is more difference and less resemblance between attrited language and dominant language, the structures in the attrited language are more vulnerable to attrition and vise versa.(4) The length of period of disuse has an inverse relationship with language attrition.On the basis of these conclusions, pedagogical implications are provided for English teaching in China. In spite of the strenuous efforts in the work, limitations still exist in the study and there is still much room for further improvement.