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1.1 The background of the study
Foreign language learning has become a craze in China and with the requirementson the command of a high level of foreign language, a great number of researches in thefield of language acquisition have been carried out. Many researchers and teachers weredevoted to seeking for ways to facilitate the foreign language learning for students inChina. However, language acquisition is closely related to language attrition. Studiesshow that learners' ability of using a certain language will be reduced after they do notuse it for a long time. And the issue began to attract some attention and the study in thisfield was formed only after 1980 when the conference on the loss of language skills washeld at the University of Pennsylvania.Language attrition is regarded as the inverse process of language acquisition. Itrefers to the phenomenon that for a person who can speak two languages or a couple ofdifferent languages, the ability of the usage of one specific language will regress withtime because of the cease or reduction of use. And the study of language attrition hasbecome a formal discipline since 1980. There are two domains in this field, whichinclude the first language attrition or mother tongue attrition and the second languageattrition or foreign language attrition. Traditionally Van Els has divided the studies oflanguage attrition into four kinds: (1) The decline of the ability of using mother tongueor the first language in mother tongue context; (2) The decline of the ability of using thefirst language or mother tongue in the second language context; (3) The decline of theability of using the second language in the first language context; (4) The decline of theability of using the second language in the second language context. And the study onthe third kind of language attrition has been an heated topic in linguistics at abroad.
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1.2 The significance of the study
Based on the above，the significance of the present study will be the folio wings:First of all，it is a natural physiological phenomenon that where there is languageacquisition, there is bound to be language attrition. On the one hand, in China，especially over recent years, many efforts have been devoted to English education，butthe efficiency is still very low. On the other hand，China has a large population ofEnglish learners, so it is evident that China has a large population of English learnerssuffering from second language attrition. In terms of this situation, it is valuable toexplore foreign language attrition in Chinese context.In the second place, researches on language acquisition have indicated that therehas been a kind of acquisition sequence in learning a certain language. And with thestudy in the field of language attrition, a similar issue is put forward whether there is acertain attrition sequence in language learning. A theory related to this issue has comeup，which is known as the Regression Hypothesis. This hypothesis was first formulatedby Roman Jackobson in a linguistic context in 1941 (Jakobson，1941)，which indicatedthe interactive mechanism between language acquisition and attrition: “First acquired，last attritied; last acquired, first attrited". Some relevant researches have been carriedout to testify this theory, and some can confirm the theory successfully while somecan本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。