A Study Of The Attrition Of English Relative Clauses Among Chinese Non-English Majors

Language attrition is viewed as the inverse process of language acquisition. It means that for the bilingual or multilingual, his ability to use a specific language regresses with time due to the reduction or cease of use. The study of language attrition was established as a field in 1980, when the conference on the Loss of Language Skills was held at University of Pennsylvania.Since then,it has been a heated research field overseas in the past three decades. However, compared with the heated research abroad, language attrition receives little attention in China. Research at home is currently focused on the introduction of research developments abroad. Empirical researches about Chinese learners of English are very rare. Furthermore, no research has been done on the attrition of relative clauses among college students in China.The present study aims to explore the attrition of English relative clauses among Chinese college students. To be specific, this study intends to find out what types of relative clauses are more vulnerable to attrition, and whether there is some correlation between English initial proficiency level, gender and relative clause attrition. The subjects are 84 third-year non-English majors in Shandong Institute of Business and Technology. Three instruments were used, namely, the Student Questionnaire, the Relative Clause Test containing 49 items and CET-4 Test paper. Data collection at time 1 started in November, 2009. The follow-up started four months later. To find out the degree of attrition, the performance of the subjects at time 2 was compared with their performance at time 1.It is found that attrition is observed in both restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses among the EFL college students in China. However, no significant differences exist between the attrition of restrictive relative clauses and that of non-restrictive relative clauses. It is also found that neither initial proficiency nor gender is correlated to the attrition of English relative clauses in Chinese context.