A Study On English Lexical Attrition Among Chinese Vocational College Students

The existence of language has both sides of acquisition and attrition. Language attrition is the reverse process of language acquisition, which is also the unavoidable process for language users. Language attrition refers to the phenomenon of the gradual regression of a certain language by bilingual or multi—lingual language learners either because they stopped or reduced using the language or they have been interfered by other languages. The conference on the Loss of Language Skills held at the University of Pennsylvania in1980has been an official landmark for the study and research on the topic of language attrition. Since then, the study on language attrition has been conducted broadly both home and abroad. Language attrition can be generally categorized into two kinds:first language attrition and second language attrition. And there are also various branches of language attrition, such as lexical attrition, grammatical attrition, phonetic attrition and so on. Vocabulary plays an important role in English learning. Lexical attrition has huge negative effects on the learning process for English learners. Lexical attrition can be defined as the delay or failure of recognizing the meaning or the part-of-speech of a certain word and the decreasing ability of using a certain word. It hinders the accumulation and consolidation of long-time learned vocabulary and slows down learners’learning efficiency. So, this thesis put much emphasis on the lexical attrition among vocational college students under the Chinese environment.This thesis targeted80non-English majored freshmen in HuBei Youth Vocational College as the subjects and conducted the research through lexical tests, questionnaire and students’ interview in order to find out the situation of lexical attrition among the students. Firstly, the study tried to learn the degree of students’ lexical attrition through two same lexical tests with four month’s interval between them. Then, it tried to find out students’understandings and awareness of lexical attrition by the questionnaire and students’interview. Lastly, on the basis of the above findings, the thesis tried to carry out some effective ways and strategies for both students and teachers to reduce lexical attrition and improve and consolidate the vocabulary level of students.The data of this research are collected and analyzed through Micro Excel2007. The major findings of this research are as follows:(1) There is an obvious lexical attrition among the subjects after the four-month’s non-exposure to English.(2) Both high-frequency word and low-frequency word suffer low lexical attrition rate.(3) Word length has no decisive influence on lexical attrition. The longest words have the lowest attrition rate. And the phrases have the highest attrition rate.(4) Few students know the term "lexical attrition", but most of them think that they themselves have experienced big lexical attrition and the main reasons for their lexical attrition are internal factors such as the previous language proficiency and learning motivation. Some external factors, like the teacher’s ways of teaching vocabulary also play a part.The above research findings have realistic significance in English vocabulary teaching and learning among vocational colleges. From students’ aspect, they should aware the existence of lexical attrition, change the bad habit and attitude of learning, and try their best to reach the critical threshold to reduce attrition. From teachers’ aspect, they should fully make their students aware that the phenomenon of lexical attrition is common, and try their best to reduce the degree of students’ lexical attrition by increasing students’ learning motivation, choosing the right teaching methods of teaching vocabulary which are well fitted for students and can satisfy students’ learning interests and improving the chances and frequency of using learned words both in class and after class.