A Study On The Relationship Between EFL Proficiency And Chinese Teenagers' Inhibition Control Ability

Cognitive inhibition advantage for EFL learners has been a vigorously debated issue in EFL cognitive research in recent years.From the cognitive perspective,EFL learning is a process of brain network modification.As the two languages of EFL learners are activated in parallel speakers should select the target language and inhibit activation of the non-target language in response to the communication demand.This cognitive exercise constantly modifies the brain network and thus results in more effective functioning of cognitive inhibition.Consequently,EFL learners develop stronger inhibition ability.However,EFL cognitive inhibition advantage has been questioned by some research findings.To resolve these arguments,it is necessary to compare EFL learners of different age groups so as to study how individuals' cognitive inhibition develops with the improvement of EFL proficiency from a developmental perspective.The present study chose Chinese EFL teenagers to measure the dynamic changes in their cognitive inhibition ability during the development of EFL proficiency.The subjects in the study were teenagers ranging from Grade 5,who were beginners in the study of English,to Grade 10.Since the self-control ability of Grade 4 was inconsistent,the experiment chose EFL learners from Grade 5 and Grade 6.Thus,we hoped to uncover how EFL learning affected the dynamic development trajectories of teenagers' cognitive inhibition ability,specifically,whether high proficiency EFL learners of different age groups outperformed their counterparts with lower EFL proficiency in cognitive inhibition ability.Students of four cognitive development stages(N=247),from Grade 5,Grade 6,Grade 8 and Grade 10 in a local Chinese middle school were chosen as subjects(The school was a private school divided into primary,middle school and high school sections.).Students of each grade were divided into two groups according to the ranking of their latest English test scores.Questionnaires and verbal fluency tests were used to measure students' language background information and EFL proficiency.A Flanker task test programmed with E-Prime version 2.0 was used to test subjects' cognitive inhibition ability.Subjects' cognitive inhibition performance was compared and examined based on their accuracy rate and response time in the Flanker task.All data were analyzed by SPSS17.0.Results showed that the differences in cognitive inhibition ability across different EFL proficiency groups demonstrated different developmental patterns between different age groups.Specifically,accuracy rates among higher proficiency EFL learners of Grade 5,6 and 10 were significantly higher than those of lower proficiency EFL groups.However,there was no significant difference between the two language groups in Grade 8.As to response time,there was no significant difference between the two EFL groups in the younger Grades 5,6 and 8.However,in Grade 10,the response time of the high proficiency group was significantly shorter than that of the low proficiency group.These results demonstrated that in general,the cognitive inhibition ability of high EFL proficiency groups was significantly better than that of their peers.Overall,along with the teenagers' rapid cognitive development,the effect of EFL learning on their cognitive inhibition development showed different developmental curves.The higher EFL proficiency primary students showed clear advantages in comparison to lower EFL proficiency groups but no differences were found between different EFL groups in junior school.This difference between the two EFL proficiency groups re-emerged in senior high grades.These results provided some relevant data for EFL education in elementary and secondary schools from the perspective of cognitive inhibition development.