A Study Of Junior High School Students' Short-term Attrition Of English Present Perfect Tense In The Chinese Context

Language attrition, the inverse process of language learning, is the regression of the language users' ability to use a language with time due to the reduction of its use. It was first formally acknowledged as an academic field at the conference on the attrition of language skills at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980. Although the language attrition research has been conducted on various aspects abroad, it has received rather limited attention at home. And the domestic experts mainly illustrate the theories and hypotheses about language attrition. Only a few papers focus on the attrition of vocabulary, the attrition of grammar like the past tense and “ing” form in the Chinese text. This paper attempts to provide some evidence for the attrition study on the present perfect tense(PPT).The study focuses on the following questions:(1)Is there PPT attrition in the junior high school(JHS) students after an interval of two months?(2)What kind of relations can be observed between the degree of PPT attrition and the initial acquisition level?(3)What are the features of PPT attrition in the JHS students?Tests on the mastery of the present perfect tense were made among 60 students selected from grade three students in a Junior high school who had a non-learning interval of two months. The data collection fell into two parts:(1) the first test of students' mastery of present perfect tense before the summer vacation;(2) a second test based on the same test made two months later.The results of the study can be summarized as follows:(1) Grade three students in the JHS did suffer language attrition after a non-learning interval of two months.(2) Because of the interplay of different factors, there didn't show significant correlation between English PPT attrition and initial language proficiency.(3) The main features of PPT attrition included: the inaccurate use of irregular verbs; the wrong tense use in the time adverbial sentences with “so far”, “yet” and “ago”. In respondence to these problems, the researcher raised some suggestions.