Research on Language Attrition in China——Based on Literature Review

Language attrition is a phenomenon of language competence decay or loss which happened in the process of language learning. Researching language attrition is instructive for both foreign and native language teaching and learning. This paper summarized the main issues of language attrition discussed in China based on the literature review (CNKI database). The findings show that language attrition research is independently becoming a sub-field of applied linguistics in China. The process of research experienced the journey of introducing the theoretical and tentative results from other countries and then applying into our situation. With more and more research scholars' concerns, most topics related to attrition were supported by academic funds. Basically, most researches focused on foreign language attrition contrast to native language attrition. The main research aspects are concerning the empirical tests, influence factors, reason analysis. The problems reflected as follows: The various tentative researches on language attrition are seldom related to the language acquisition; the interactive effects among attrition factors were not detected. It is necessary to do cross-disciplinary analysis with other subjects such as psychology, cognitive linguistics, neuro-linguistics and social linguistics. Meanwhile, further work should be done on native language and dialects attrition. Future research will be focused on the language community attrition and follow-up research on the time-ranged attrition. Most work will be done on establishing attrition theories applicable into Chinese linguistic environment.