A Survey Of English Lexical Attrition Among Senior High School Students

This research is conducted to investigate English lexical attrition of high school students after the summer vacation.The effects of students' initial English proficiency and the amount of exposure to English during the vacation on lexical attrition are explored.Besides,the relationship between lexical attrition and vocabulary linguistic features are detected.On the whole,this research is expected to help students impede or at least slow down their English lexical attrition during the break of their systematic learning.Based on the Inverse Hypothesis and the Activation Threshold Hypothesis,this research put forward the following three questions:(1)How does the initial English proficiency affect lexical attrition?(2)How does the amount of exposure to English during summer vacation influence lexicalattrition?(3)What's the relationship between lexical attrition and vocabulary linguistic features?The subjects of this study are 120 senior one students from GZ No.65 high school.The instruments employed in this research are an English vocabulary test,a questionnaire and the scores students got in the final exam.The English vocabulary test is constructed on the basis of the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale(VKS)by Wesche & Paribkht(1996),and the questionnaire is adapted from Ni's(2012),which is employed to investigate the amount of students' exposure to English during summer vacation.The research lasted for about two months,the vocabulary pre-test was administrated on June 23,2017,and the post-test was held on September 5,2017,after which the questionnaire was conducted.The findings of this research are presented as follows.Firstly,students as a whole suffer significant English lexical attrition after the two months summer vacation,and the attrition rate is 12.65%.Besides,the initial English proficiency is inversely proportional to the lexical attrition degree(r=-.344).The lexical attrition rate of the high proficiency students is 7.28%.It is 12.18% for intermediate proficiency students,and 21.89% for low proficiency students.Therefore,the higher the initial English proficiency is,the less the lexical attrition will be,which is in accordance with the Inverse Hypothesis.Secondly,there is a negative correlation between the amount of exposure and lexical attrition(r=-.541),which conforms to the Activation Threshold Hypothesis.Thirdly,adjectives,disyllabic words and polysyllabic words are more prone to attrition.Moreover,students with high English proficiency have less lexical attrition than that of the low English proficiency students in terms of word class and word length,which further justifies the Inverse Hypothesis.This research has the following pedagogical implications.To begin with,we should endeavor to improve students' initial English proficiency,since the higher the students' English proficiency is,the less lexical attrition they will have.Moreover,we should raise students' contact with English during the vacation to slow down their lexical attrition.Finally,adjectives,disyllabic words and polysyllabic words should be emphasized in English teaching,for they are more vulnerable to attrition.