An Empirical Study On The Attrition Of English Language Knowledge Among English Major Undergraduates

As the inverse process of language acquisition,language attrition refers to the phenomenon that a bilingual or multilingual's language proficiency gradually deteriorate with time due to the reduction or termination of use.It was first acknowledged as an independent discipline at the conference on the Attrition of Language Skills at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980.Within over three-decade development,language attrition study is now “reaching puberty”(de Bot,2004,p.233),and it has achieved fruitful results abroad.However,study on language attrition in China still “remains in the introduction and theoretical phase,lacking of originality”(Ni Chuanbin,2012,p.48).On the basis of previous study,this study aims at exploring the actuality of English attrition among English major undergraduates after three-month vacation.Three research questions are proposed as follows: 1)Does attrition occur in English major undergraduates over three-month vacation? What is the actuality of attrition of different language knowledge,such as vocabulary,grammar and reading ? 2)How does the amount of exposure to target language affect the attrition? 3)Are there any gender differences on English language attrition and different language knowledge(vocabulary,grammar and reading)?To answer these questions,54 third-year English majors from North University of China are chosen as subjects.Integrated English test,questionnaire and interview are applied in this study.The collected data are analyzed by Excel and SPSS 17.0.The major findings are as follows: 1)English attrition actually exists among all the participants more or less after their systematic English learning.Grammar knowledge is more vulnerable to suffer attrition in the present study,then followed by vocabulary and reading skills.2)Exposure to the target language is proved to be significantly and negatively correlated with the subjects' attrition degree,namely,the more exposure they have,the less attrition they would suffer.3)There are no statistically significant gender differences on English language attrition,as well as vocabulary,grammar and reading skills.Finally,based on the research results,some implications and suggestions for the foreign language teaching and learning have been presented: language instructors should introduce some efficient learning strategies to learners to fight against the attrition and encourage them to maintain enough exposure to thelanguage after the formal instructions;language learners should seek for various of opportunities to use language for maintaining their language knowledge as much as possible.