Investigation Into The Influence Of Non-English Majors' Lexical Learning Strategies On English Lexical Attrition

Language attrition is regarded as the reverse process of language acquisition. It refers to the phenomena that the bilingual or multilingual users' language skills retrogress by reducing or stopping the use of a language. And lexical attrition is an important part of the language attrition, till now; there are abundant of qualitative analysis articles about lexical attrition. Many factors affect English lexical attrition, and lexical learning strategy is one of the main factors in the field of lexical attrition. However, there are few quantitative analysis studies to explore the relationship between lexical learning strategy and English lexical attrition. Therefore, this thesis analyzed the relationship between English lexical learning strategies and English lexical attrition, in order to find out some specific strategies to reduce the degree of lexical attrition.There are three issues involved: 1). six months later, is there any lexical attrition among subjects? 2). what are the relationships between the English lexical learning strategies and English lexical attrition?3). what are the differences in using lexical learning strategies high attrition group and low attrition group?This study adopted quantitative research method and randomly chose 112 non- English majors who just finished the second year formal English courses from Northwest Normal University. However, in the sample of 112 subjects, only 84 subjects meet the following conditions:(1) participated in the CET-4(2) have not studied English during the six months. After attending the second Vocabulary Levels Test, there were five students' scores increased. Therefore, there were only 79 students as the research subjects. The research instruments used in this study included: a lexical learning strategy questionnaire, which was borrowed from O'Malley and Chamot(1990) and Gu & Johnson's(1996) and adapted by Deng Fang(2012); the Nation's(1990) Vocabulary Levels Test(VLT). It contained three steps.(1) The questionnaire entitled Vocabulary Levels Test was administered and collected the students' lexical scores in the first test(2) Collected the students' lexical scores in the second test after six months(3) the strategy questionnaire was administered. The research findings were: 1) There was indeed lexical attrition among students after six months; 2) the lexical attrition degree and the lexical learning strategies were negatively correlated, and among the strategies, metacognitive strategy, guessing strategy and encoding strategy were the three important strategies that correlated with English lexical attrition degree. That is, the more the subjects use those three strategies, the less lexical attrition they suffer; 3) the low attrition group used lexical learning strategies more frequently than high attrition group. The low attrition group used learning plan strategy, self-evaluation strategy, guessing strategy and encoding strategy more frequently; the high attrition group used repetition strategy and dictionary strategy more frequently.