非英语方向学生词汇磨蚀语言学特征研究

本文是语言学论文,In order to find out whether non-English major students will suffer fromvocabulary attrition after they stop taking English courses, and what’s the linguisticcharacteristics of vocabulary attrition, 215 junior and senior college students arerequired to finish a vocabulary test which is made up of 60 words selected fromdifferent word class, word length and word frequency. Those subjects need to pick upthe right Chinese meaning of the 60 words without looking through dictionaries orasking others.After the analyses of the data, the following are some findings:First of all, through the analysis of the data, it is found that the phenomenon ofvocabulary attrition does exist. The overall attrition rate reaches 9.077% withsignificant difference. This indicates that if words are not frequently extracted andused after stopping English learning, it is easy for words to be attrited.Secondly, this study also finds that there are different degrees of attrition in theaspects of part of speech, word length and word frequency. Of the four parts of speech,verbs are relatively the least resistant to abrasion, so the degree of abrasion of verbs isthe deepest. Nouns and adjectives have similar attrition conditions, and adverbs havethe best attrition resistance. In terms of word length, compared with shorts lengthwords and intermediate length words, the attrition of long words is the most serious.Short length words are the best to memorize. Finally, for word frequency, intermediatefrequency words are the most easily forgotten compared with the other two frequencywords.Thirdly, students of different levels also have vocabulary attrition. In the aspect ofpart of speech, the most difficult word class for high level students are the adjectives,but for the low level students are the verbs. For word frequency, intermediatefrequency words are the most likely to be attrited by both high-level and low-levelstudents. In terms of word length, high level students’long words are not rememberedwell while low level students’intermediate words are not mastered well.To sum up, this study attempts to study whether non-English majors havevocabulary attrition. By describing the existence of vocabulary attrition, this paperanalyzes the linguistic features of vocabulary attrition and briefly explains thepossible causes, so as to provide teachers and students with corresponding suggestionsin terms of vocabulary teaching and learning.

Chapter 1 Introduction

As is known to all, there are various aspects of English study such as vocabulary,

grammar and writing while the most crucial one is vocabulary. It is can be regarded asthe foundation of a house, without which the house is not stable. As a precondition tolearn English, the amount of vocabulary and the mastery of vocabulary knowledgedirectly affect the development of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translatingskills. Lewis(1993) pointed out that vocabulary acquisition was the central task oflanguage learning because every language learning and improvement depend on it.But on account of stopping systematical English courses’ learning and lackingsubsequent study, a large quantity of students’ foreign language ability has started todecrease, which is a quite prevalent phenomenon that can be seen in plenty ofuniversities. So this paper mainly concentrate on non-English major college students’vocabulary attrition.Based on the above analysis, the research background of this paper mainlyconsists of two aspects: from a practical point of view, after the reduction or cessationof English learning, both college students and teachers in colleges and universitiesneed guidance to prevent the attrition of English vocabulary. From the academic pointof view, the research on foreign language attrition over the past 30 years is relativelymature and the research results show a diversified pattern, while the research onvocabulary attrition in China is still in its infancy, with relatively few empiricalstudies, and there is still a lot of tentative expansion space.This part gives a simple and direct introduction about the main chapters of thepaper. There are five parts in the paper：Chapter One pays attention to the research background, purpose of choosing the topic , significance of the paper as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter Twoliterature review expounds the definition and some pivotal terms of vocabularyattrition on the basis of summarizing previous studies. On top of this, related theoriesand vital researches at home and aboard. Chapter Three elaborates researchmethodology which includes research questions, subjects and instruments. What’smore, data collection and analysis also are explained. Chapter Four analyzes theresults and discussion about the data, applying different methods with the help ofSPSS 17.0. The crucial part consists of linguistic features such as word class, wordlength, and word frequency. Chapter Five draws a conclusion of the data and givessome useful suggestions in teaching English vocabulary according to the analysis.

Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Definition of LanguageAttrition

The research of language attrition started in 1980s and it aimed to find out thebest way for patients with aphasia to recover from the disease. Therefore, the maintheoretical sources in previous study came from the perspective of memory and theangle of oblivion in psychology research. But language attrition became an emergingand independent research field after the meeting“The Loss of Language Skills”held atthe University of Pennsylvania in 1980. Since then, plenty of several eminent scholarshave paid much attention on the topic of language attrition. Lambert and Freed (1982)defined it as the loss of a language or a particular aspect of a language by anindividual or a speech community. It may refer to the reduction of contacting withnative language skills in bilingual environment or under minority in some languageenvironment where one language, due to political or social purposes, replaced anotherone. Language attrition also stood for the deterioration of language skills on thepatients who had nerve damage and the old’s reduce in some certain types of languageusage. Meanwhile, language attrition can be defined the death of the whole language.It was the earliest attempt to explain the definition of language attrition and thisdefinition covers a wide range, however, it neglected the difference between languageloss, language shift and language attrition.In terms of language structure, Kaufman (1991) regarded language attrition as aprocess of incorporating the structure of the mother tongue into the second language.Seliger (1991) believed that language attrition was the disintegration of the mothertongue’s structure. Based on the use of language in language communities under the guidance of sociolinguistic research method, there are other different explanationstowards language attrition.Jaspaert & Kroon(1989) reckoned it as the language changes that broughtcommunication difficulties to individuals or members of language communities andfurther points out that it is a process of gradual loss of language skills due to limited language use. Weltens (1993) expanded that the loss of a language meant the declineof every aspects in language appeared in individual and language community whilelanguage shift may refer to the decrease of language abilities from generations togenerations. Lastly, language attrition is viewed as the loss of language abilities in theprocess of time passage. de Bot &Weltens (1995) held the view that linguistic attritionwas linguistically the decline of various types of language skills in individuals andlanguage communities.

2.2 Classification of LanguageAttrition

The first type means the loss of first language in first language environment,such as the loss of dialect or the death of a language. Many old people can masterdifferent dialects in different areas but after their death some dialect will be lost. Thesecond type refers to the loss of first language in second language environment. Thosewho have an immigration to other countries for a long time are likely to experiencethe loss of first language on account of stopping using it. The third type is the attritionof second language in first language environment just like our second languagelearners’language attrition. The fourth type means second language attrition in secondenvironment. The elderly immigrants have an attrition of the second language aftermany years in that their language ability would decline on account of becoming old,and at the same time their memory also get worse. Therefore, it is easy to get attrited.Welten (1987) divides language attrition into pathological and non-pathologicalattrition. The former represents the loss of language ability because of brain disease orinjury while the latter believes that language attrition is caused by external naturalfactors, such as language environment and age. This study mainly concentrates on thethird type of language attrition in non-pathological situation.In the past few years, there are many hypothesis about language attrition such ascritical threshold hypothesis, inverted hypothesis, extraction failure hypothesis,selective hypothesis, interference hypothesis, Jackbson’s regression hypothesis andmarkedness hypothesis which are based on cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics,bilingual neurolinguistics as well as some modern scientific methodology. But in thisstudy, attention may be paid attention to some more vital and prevailing hypothesis.

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Chapter 3 Research Methodology.............................................................................15

3.1 Research Questions....................................................................................... 15

3.2 Subjects...........................................................................................................15

3.3 Instruments....................................................................................................17

Chapter 4 Results and Discussion.............................................................................20

4.1 Degree of VocabularyAttrition.................................................................... 20

4.2 Linguistic Characteristics on VocabularyAttrition...................................21
Chapter 5 Conclusion.................................................................................................38

5.1 Major Findings.............................................................................................. 38

5.2 Suggestions on Vocabulary Teaching...........................................................39

Chapter 4 Results and Discussion

4.1 Degree of VocabularyAttrition

In this part, descriptive statistics and independent sample T-test are used toanalyze the vocabulary test scores of junior and senior college students, aiming to findout the existence of word attrition through quantitative analysis.The degree of vocabulary attrition is conducted through descriptive statistics.Table 4-1 describes the mean value, extreme value and standard deviation of juniorand senior year students. From the overall average score, the junior students’ finalscore is 41.9488, and the senior average score is 36.5023, indicating a difference of5.4465 points. As a result, the overall test score drops. To a certain extent, thevocabulary attrition occurs in the senior year, and the attrition rate is 9.077%. That isto say, after two years of required English courses, most students gradually begin toforget English vocabulary without contacting with English.From the perspective of extreme value, the maximum score of junior and themaximum score of senior are both 58 points, which is not a big difference. However,from the perspective of the minimum value, the minimum value of the junior year is23, while the minimum value of the senior year is 14. There is a full 9 pointsdifference between the two grades, which is still a big gap. Finally, we see thestandard deviation. The standard deviation of the junior year is 7.30716, with a smalldegree of dispersion, indicating that the junior year's performance tends to be morestable. Comparatively speaking, the standard deviation of the senior year is 9.41806,with a large degree of dispersion, and the performance of the subjects fluctuates more.In order to further observe the existence of the vocabulary attrition phenomenon,this paper also uses independent samples test method to detect it. As can be seen fromtable 4-2, Sig.(2-tailed) is.000(< 0.05). This indicates that there is a linear relationshipat the significance level of 0.000, and the results are valid. At the same time, it can seethat the upper value is 7.04440 and the lower value is 3.84862 in the 95% confidenceinterval, excluding zero, which indicates the difference between the two grades andfurther confirms the existence of the vocabulary attrition phenomenon. Thus, it isquite obvious that after stopping English learning, senior students’ vocabulary doesnot mastered well compared with junior students so that senior students’ grade islower than junior students’.

4.2 Linguistic Characteristics on VocabularyAttrition

It can be seen from table 4-3 that among the four word class (noun, verb,adjective and adverb), nouns have the highest overall score, followed by verbs,adjectives and adverbs. In terms of average scores, junior students do better in thevocabulary test paper. In terms of the comparison between the two grades, the overallaverage score of the senior year decrease. The average score of junior and seniordrops from 11.6884 to 10.3209. The verb drops from 10.4651 to 9.0419, the adjectivefrom 10.2465 to 8.9256, and the adverb from 9.5116 to 8.2047. From the perspectiveof maximum value and minimum value, the maximum value of the four parts ofspeech is basically 15 point, the minimum value is basically below 6 point, and theminimum score of the senior adjectives is only 1 point. Therefore, the score gapbetween students is relatively large.n order to further understand whether the four parts of speech have experiencedlexical attrition, independent sample T test is further used to analyze the data. It canbe found from table 4-4 that the mean values of the four word class of the junior andsenior grades are all different. For nouns, the mean difference is 1.36744 and thestandard deviation of the difference is 2.22373. The significance probability of thetwo-tailed t test is 0.000 (<0.05), indicating that there is a statistical difference in thescores of students in two grades of the noun, so the noun are attrited. In terms of verbs,the mean difference between junior and senior years is 1.42326, and the significanceprobability of two-tailed t test is 0.000 (<0.05), which suggests that there is also astatistical difference between the grades of students in the two grades of verbs.Therefore, the verbs have apparent attrition. The next part is about adjectives andadverbs. The mean difference between the two word class are 1.32093 and 1.30698,respectively. The probability of significance found by two-tailed t test is both 0.000(<0.05). It shows that both adjectives and adverbs have been attrited. And the degreeof attrition of the adverb is the lowest, indicating that the attrition resistance of theadverb is the best and adverbs can be remembered firmly.