An Empirical Study Of English Nouns Attrition Among English Graduates In China

Language attrition as a research field was founded in the 1980s. The conference held at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980 on the topic Loss of Language Skills marked its foundation. During the following 30 years, researches on language attrition have undergone a fast development and generated fruitful results.Through nearly half century's development, a great number of profound scholars on language attrition emerged in foreign countries. They published fruitful books and articles, figured out some affective variables in language attrition and some linguistic features of the attrited elements, and perfected a series of research methods. However, language attrition research in China is too rare compared with those researches in foreign countries. Scholars in China tend to introduce theories and results of foreign research. In recent years, there are some scholars in China who are inclined to discuss the theories of language attrition actively.Being an important element in any language, vocabulary becomes the focus of language attrition. Foreign empirical studies on vocabulary attrition focus on how word class, word frequency, word length, similarity and context coverage affect vocabulary attrition. In China, several graduate students made investigations into English vocabulary attrition among Chinese college students or middle school students. This thesis aims to carry out a study on English nouns attrition among English graduates, who are advanced English learners in China, and intends to find out whether there is English nouns attrition among the subjects and whether there is some correlation between the subjects'motivation intensity and English nouns attrition.The present research intends to explore the attrition or loss of foreign language skills and knowledge by foreign language learners several months after formal language teaching. This research chooses second-year English graduates as subjects and intends to check out whether there is any attrition observed in the nouns which the subjects have learned in their course three months after their formal class training. The study would further examine whether motivation intensity can influence the attrition of English nouns.The study adopts quantitative method. Thirty English graduates who were enrolled to Foreign Language College in Ocean University of China were selected as participants. The instruments are learning background information questionnaire, motivation questionnaire and vocabulary test. The time interval of attrition in this study is three months, namely, from the end of the students'formal class learning to the beginning of the new term. There are two procedures of collecting data in this study. The first data collection was launched immediately after the participants stop their formal class learning. The questionnaires were distributed to each student in the last 30 minutes of their last class and were collected after the participants finished them. The second data collection was held three months later. At Time 2 the participants were asked at to finish the background information questionnaire which aims to collect information about their English learning information during the summer vocation. The data collected was analyzed by SPSS 16.0.The major findings of the present study are as follows: 1) the vocabulary as a whole shows no attrition three months after the subjects stop their formal class learning; 2) terminologies show obvious attrition after the subjects stop formal class learning for three months, but ordinary nouns show no attrition; 3) there is no correlation between the subjects'motivation intensity and English nouns attrition. There are five chapters in this thesis. Chapter one is introduction. It introduces the English learning situation in China, the necessity of doing language attrition research in China, and the structure of the thesis. Chapter two presents the definitions and theories of language attrition, and the research situation abroad and at home as well. Chapter three introduces the research questions, subjects, instruments, methods and procedures of the study. Chapter four shows the results of the empirical study by using SPSS 16.0 and discusses the result of the study. Chapter five is conclusion.