| Language attrition, as a reverse process of language acquisition, has been defined as the phenomenon that the bilingual or multi-lingual's ability of using one specific language regresses with time due to cease or reduction of use. After over 70 years development, language attrition has became an independent discipline. In the past three decades after the Conference on the Attrition of Language Skills at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, a series of international conferences and workshops were inspired abroad. In terms of theories, researchers have built up a relative integrated framework and open up new avenues of research by studying language attrition from the aspects of psychology, neurology, linguistics and so on. These achievements provide a new perspective for the theories in linguistics and applied linguistics, language teaching and language planning.Language learning is a process which involves not only acquisition but also attrition. To draw the whole picture of language learning, we should study language acquisition on one hand and attrition on the other. Compared with fruitful researches and inspired results in language acquisition, the study on language attrition started late in China, and works and desertions are considerably few. Up to now, only few researchers like Ni Chuanbin, Zhong Shuneng, Cai Hansong and Yang Lianrui have reported several literature review articles on language attrition. Studying language attrition in China where lack of input of English can shed light on English teaching. Therefore, the present study is to make a tentative study to investigate the L2 attrition among Chinese senior high school students, and to find out the relationship between language attrition and proficiency.In terms of different language aspects, we study language attrition from three aspects of English: sound, vocabulary and grammar (morphology and syntax). In abroad, researchers show preference to the study of vocabulary attrition. Passive voice is regarded as a common and complicated grammar in both English and Chinese. It is a big problem for Chinese students to learn English passive voice. Many researchers have studied the acquisition on passive voice under the theoretical framework for foreign language acquisition. No paper about Chinese learners'attrition of English passive voice has been found. This paper is based on the study on Chinese senior high school students and the following three questions will be discussed: 1) Is there any attrition after the participants stop the formal study of passive voice structures at school during three months'summer vacation? 2) Does the prototypical passive voice attrition differ from the non-prototypical structure? 3) Does and how does the language proficiency affect the structures of passive voice attrition?In order to find out the answers, the author makes out a paper, the difficulty of which is in accord with the overall proficiency for the senor high school students after studying the theories on language attrition and passive voice. Then an investigation is made on the National Entrance Exam paper for the resent 10 years. The tests are done in two stages. 102 subjects take part in the test in stage 1, and 30 of them take part in the test in stage 2 after three months'holiday. SPSS is used to analyze the attrition on passive voice in these two stages. The passive voice is divided into prototypical passive voice and non-prototypical passive voice. Several results are found. Firstly, attrition is observed in the passive voice structures for senior high school students after a termination of systematic English study during three months summer holiday. And markedness and frequency play a more profound role in the attrition. Secondly, although the learners have a better mastery on the prototypical passives than non-prototypical passives before attrition, there is no significant different in attrition between the two different kinds of passives. Thirdly, it is proved that the relationship between the language attrition and proficiency before attrition is that there is a positive relationship between proficiency and passives attrition. That is, the higher proficiency, the higher attrition in passive structures. The further investigation into the relationship between proficiency and prototypical passives and the relationship between proficiency and non-prototypical passives attrition found that proficiency and prototypical passives are weakly correlated, and proficiency and non-prototypical passives are positively correlated. |
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