Lexical fluency and richness in L2 attrition among Chinese college English learners
Improving learners'lexical proficiency is an important goal in college English instruction.To date,research on learners'lexical attrition after completing college English courses remains relatively scarce.This study tracks the attrition of a cohort of learners'second language lexical fluency and richness at four time points through the lens of Dynamic Systems Theory to reveal the intrinsic nature of the processes of lexical development and attrition.Participants completed a verbal fluency task,a topic-based speaking task,and a film-retelling task immediately after completing college English instruction(T1),and again after 3 months(T2),6 months(T3),and 9 months(T4).We assessed the data using a set of lexical fluency and richness indices and then subjected the values to statistical analysis.Results indicate that:1)Participants exhibited significant attrition in lexical fluency at T2,gradual recovery at T3,and further improvement at T4;2)In terms of lexical richness,lexical density did not differ significantly across the four time points in either the topic-based speaking task or the film-retelling task,but significant cross-time differences emerged in lexical sophistication in the topic-based speaking task and in lexical variation in both tasks.These findings have important implications for college foreign language teaching.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
