The Correlation Study Between Lexical Attrition And Mnemonic Strategy Among Senior High School Students

Language attrition has been perceived as the inverse process of language acquisition and has been always accompanied by students’ English learning.Lexical attrition,as the most vulnerable component in language attrition,has gained broader attention in the circle of language attrition study.Meanwhile,as a memory aiding device for English vocabulary learning,mnemonic strategy has received extensive attention in the study of learning strategies in recent years.Since mnemonic strategy and lexical attrition both pay attention to vocabulary learning and its forgetting process,there must be a close relationship between them.Currently,the studies about lexical attrition and mnemonic strategy are abundant,but the correlation study between them is rare.So,this paper combines quantitative research with qualitative research method and tries to answer the three questions.Firstly,is there any lexical attrition to the senior high school students after a two-month holiday,and if any,what is the degree of lexical attrition? Secondly,what is the current situation of the mnemonic strategy employment among senior high school students? Thirdly,what is the correlation between lexical attrition and mnemonic strategy?This paper investigated 116 senior high school students’ lexical attrition rate after a two-month holiday through the vocabulary pre-test and post-test,analyzed the current situation of students’ employment of mnemonic strategies through the data of questionnaire,and explored the correlation between lexical attrition and mnemonic strategies through the statistical analysis of vocabulary test paper and questionnaire.Meanwhile,the semi-structured interview has developed to four English language teachers and think-aloud protocol to students.According to the data of the interview,reasons of lexical attrition phenomenon and the effect of teachers’ strategy instruction to students’ mnemonic strategy employment have been analyzed and discussed.Based on the statistical analysis of collected data by SPSS 17.0,this paper drew some conclusions as follows.First of all,the lexical attrition rate of senior high school students after a two-month holiday is up to 33% which is 10% higher than formerstudies.Secondly,senior high school students often employ general memorizing strategies and sometimes employ vocabulary mnemonic strategies to memorize English words,however,vocabulary mnemonic strategies can significantly resist lexical attrition.Among the mnemonic strategies,context strategy,part of speech analysis strategy and application strategy have the most significant resistant effect on lexical attrition.Inappropriate employment of categorization strategy would make students puzzled when retrieving vocabulary information,and imagination strategy sometimes is considered as the time-consuming and irregular strategy by English language teachers.Thirdly,English language teachers’ strategy instruction can promote students’ mnemonic strategies employment,meanwhile,both embedded instruction and explicit instruction have significant effects.Teachers should conduct suitable strategy instruction based on students’ features.