An Investigation into English Vocabulary Attrition among College Students of Non-English Majors in Inner Mongolia University for the Nationalities

Since language attrition was formally recognized at the conference on the “Attrition of Language Skills ” at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, the past three decades saw the numerous studies and researches on it. Language attrition refers to a constant overall regression of language ability with decreased or ceased language use. Language attrition as the inverse process of language acquisition provides a brand-new perspective for language acquisition study. Thus, language acquisition study is incomplete without study on language attrition. Most of related researches and studies of language attrition have been finished in European, American and Japanese contexts. A good academic harvest is reaped by foreign scholars, such as Seliger, Sharwood, Bahrick