A Study On The Attrition Difference Of Different Types Of English Phrasal Verbs Among Chinese College Students

Language attrition has always been a hot area of foreign language study overseas during the past three decades, and the conference on the topic of The Loss of Language Skills held at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980 manifests language attrition rising as a new independent research field. Language attrition means that the bilingual or multilingual users, due to the cease or reduction of use of the language, their abilities of using one specific language regress with time. Many scholars abroad have conducted numerous researches on language attrition both theoretically and empirically, and have achieved many valuable results. Language attrition has been viewed as the inverse process of language acquisition. Compared with language acquisition, language attrition is considered to have a much broader area needs exploring. In recent years, language attrition study begins to attract increasing attention among domestic scholars. Language attrition study is advancing with rapid development, it has been paid great attention in the field of linguistics and applied linguistics, also on language planning and language teaching. In view of the current situation that China has a large number of foreign language learners and language attrition researches would exert a great significance on foreign language acquisition, the present paper aims to investigate the attrition of English phrasal verbs among Chinese College students who learn English as a foreign language.Phrasal verbs stand for an extremely important feature of English language; they are widely used either in everyday communication or formal discourse, and frequently appear in various tests. This paper dedicates to study different types of English phrasal verbs, try to explore and answer three questions: 1) Will different types of English phrasal verbs suffer varied degrees of attrition? 2) Does English proficiency level prior to attrition have an effect on the attrition of different types of English phrasal verbs? 3) Does English proficiency level prior to attrition interact with phrasal verb types? Moreover, the study attempts to justify whether the two influential theories related to language attrition, namely, Inverse Hypothesis and Selectivity Theory, can be supported by the data observed in the study of the attrition difference among different types of phrasal verbs.167 non-English major sophomores are selected at first, their CET-4 scores are obtained according to the background information. Then SPSS16.0 is used to sort all of their scores from high to low, those subjects who rank the top 25% will be classified as the high English proficiency learners and those who rank the last 25% will be classified as the low English proficiency learners, and they are finally confirmed for participation in this study. A questionnaire consisting of 45 items including three different types of English phrasal verbs are administered to the subjects twice with an interval of five months. The results obtained in this thesis indicate: 1) phrasal verbs of different types suffer varied degrees of attrition, among which figurative phrasal verb suffers the highest degree of attrition, completive phrasal verb and literal phrasal verb suffer varied degrees of attrition within the two level groups; 2) subjects with relatively high English proficiency level prior to attrition suffer less attrition on the three different types of phrasal verbs compared with subjects with low English proficiency level prior to attrition; 3) English proficiency level prior to attrition has an interactive effect with phrasal verb types.Based on the findings, the present study makes some suggestions and implications for domestic phrasal verb teaching in hoping that it could provide insights for foreign language teaching and learning.