A Study Of The Effects Of Word Concreteness On Lexical Attrition Of Chinese Primary School Students

In the recent years, language attrition has been theorized from differentperspectives, basing on whether the prominence is given to individual factors,linguistic aspects or social environment. Different contexts in America, Europe, andAsia as well as different subjects in age, sex, personality, and aptitude have beeninvestigated as empirical grounds for detailed and profound analysis. Researches onlanguage attrition at home, compared with the popularity and fruitfulness abroad,received less attention. Most of studies were focused on literature review andintroduction of achievements and tendency abroad.Vocabulary is the basic building block of language, therefore lexical attrition asan essential part of language attrition has been intensively studied. Word concretenessis regarded as an influential factor of language and lexical acquisition. Recently，language attrition and word concreteness have been taken into considerationrespectively by numerous researches,however no empirical study has been conductedto explore the relationship between lexical attrition and word concreteness for theprimary school students in the Chinese context.This thesis aims to investigate the effects of word concreteness on lexicalattrition of primary school students by a quantitative study in the Chinese context.Three questions are presented and analyzed:1. Do primary school students sufferlexical attrition after a summer vacation in the Chinese context?2. Does wordconcreteness of English words result in different degrees of attrition of learned wordsin the Chinese context for elementary students? Which one—concrete word orabstract word—is more prone to be attrited after English disuse or reduced use byChinese learners in the Chinese context?3. Does the English proficiency level (high, moderate, low) impact the degree of attrition of concrete and abstract wordsrespectively in the Chinese context?A quantitative approach is adopted in the study. The summer holiday is chosenas the attrition period. Initial subjects of the present research are99elementarystudents chosen from Primary School Attached to Shandong Normal University.Among the99participants, only75participants satisfied the requirement that one hasno contact or reduced contact with English material and context during the summervacation. The instruments used in the study include a questionnaire about the Englishstudy and learning activities in summer holiday, their comprehensive Englishperformance of last term and a devised vocabulary test according to the fourth book ofNew Primary English for China Students’ book. Two steps are contained in the study.(1) Before summer vacation the vocabulary test was administrated for students andtheir comprehensive performance of last term was collected as their languageproficiency.(2) After summer vacation the same vocabulary test was administratedagain and the questionnaire is employed. Then, the SPSS20.0was applied to processthe collected data.The major findings are as follows:1) The Chinese primary school students hadsuffered lexical attrition after a summer vacation.2) Abstract words were more proneto be attrited when compared with concrete words.3) Students in the low proficiencylevel group and the moderate level group endured more attrition of abstract wordsthan the high one. There is a weak negative correlation between the attrition ofabstract words as a whole and FL Proficiency.