On Passive Voice Attrition Among Non-english Majors From The Perspective Of Dynamic Systems Theory

Language attrition is the inverse process of language acquisition,which refers to the decline of language competence after one stops using a certain language.As Richard Lambert firstly introduced the concept of language attrition into linguistics,foreign researchers started to realize the importance of language attrition and then researches in this filed have experienced great development ever since.However,compared with the researches on the language attrition abroad,Chinese researchers are still in the initial stage of introducing theories of language attrition abroad into applied linguistics researches and relatively a small quantity of empirical studies have been conducted recently,and there is almost a blank on the researches of grammatical attrition in Chinese context.In this study,a' quantitative empirical study was conducted among 215 non-English majors to explore whether the subjects would undergo passive voice attrition after they finished systematic English instruction and the relationship with three affecting factors from the perspective of Dynamic Systems Theory.The data collected from a Background Questionnaire in combination with a Passive Voice Test(adapted from Li's)was analyzed by SPSS19.0 to address the following research questions in this study:(1)Is there any attrition of passive voice structure after non-English majors finish two-year courses of College English?Are there any differences among them during different time spans?(2)Does gender have any impact on passive voice attrition?And what's the relationship between them?(3)Are there any differences in passive voice attrition among the participants with different pre-attrition English proficiency levels?And if there are some differences,which kind of subjects suffers more passive voice attrition?Afterwards,a semi-structured interview with 12 open-ended questions was carried out with 12 subjects to further explore the relationship between them as well as possible solutions for grammatical attrition.The results found in this study were as follows:(1)Obvious grammatical attrition of English passive voice is observed in this study,and the subjects do have different attrition performances during different time spans:little attrition is observed within 3 months' of disuse while the attrition degree and speed gradually increase after 1 year of disuse,and the attrition with 3 to 5 years' disuse is most significant.(2)There are no significant differences in gender influence on passive voice attrition,but females have a tendency to retain more grammar rules in the long run.(3)The pre-attrition language proficiency is highly related with grammatical attrition.The subjects of all English proficiency levels retain the majority of passive voice structure after 3 months' disuse.However,in the time span of 1 to 2 years,those subjects with higher English proficiency still keep high retention rate while those with low English proficiency suffer dramatic attrition.And with 3 to 5 years' disuse of English or no exposure to it,all the subjects of different English proficiency levels suffer great attrition of passive voice structure.