Language Attrition and Language Maintenance

Kei Kobayashi

Summary

Nowadays the number of people who go overseas to study language is increasing every year. When we go overseas our language level would improve quickly but there are not only good points but also bad points. We might loose some of our native language skill. This is called language attrition. Language attrition in L1 would happen under a situation when L2 usage is beyond L1. It is also called language loss. There are four main reasons why language attrition happens.

  1. Lack of use or lack of the language environment
  2. Interference
  3. Retrieval failure
  4. Schema difference L1 and L2

We all had some Japanese friends and had chance to use Japanese, however, we experienced language attrition. It was not so crucial but we were surprised. Language attrition tended to happen for productive skills, speaking and writing rather than receptive skills, reading and listening.

Research questions

  1. to find out whether we have language attrition or not and if we do so how it happens to us.
  2. to find out how to maintain our language level

The experiment

Subjects:Nine students from Notre Dame Seishin University who had been overseas for about a year.

Instrument:Questionnaire

Procedure:My questionnaire consisted of three parts.

  1. General questions about subjects’ studying abroad data.
  2. Experiences overseas which is about brushing up English and language attrition in Japanese.
  3. Experiences back in Japan.

Results

People who are studying foreign language would have language attrition in their first language. Language attrition should take into consideration with language studying.

More than six months has passed since we came back from overseas. We feel our English level is declining.

1. To brush up English when we were overseas.

We tried to push ourselves into an English speaking environment as much as we could. For example, imitating what natives said, went to the library to browse newspapers and magazines everyday, and ask our friends to correct our mistakes and so on.

We had to study hard because of the huge amount of homework and to understand classes so we spent much time in English reading and writing.

2. About language attrition.

All people had some kind of language attrition in Japanese more or less. We tend to have language attrition for speaking and writing, especially tip-of-the tongue and kanji problems. No one had troubles for listening.

Troubles using Japanese

Never / Once a week / Daily / Several times a week
Speaking / 33% / 33% / 33% / 0%
Reading / 67% / 33% / 0% / 0%
Writing / 33% / 33% / 33% / 0%
Listening / 100% / 0% / 0% / 0%

Everyone has some possibility to loose his/her first language when studying so we should do these things to prevent language attrition.

Speak in JapaneseWrite in Japanese

Read in JapaneseListen in Japanese

3. To maintain English level.

All of us worry about it so much. We all think that it is quite difficult to find English environment all the time in Japanese society so we try some ways we can do easily in daily life.

Speaking:talk to English speaking people actively, talk to ourselves in English, use MSN messenger etc

Reading:newspaper, magazine, book and website etc

Writing: keep diary, write a letter and e-mail etc

Listening: radio, TV, DVD (with and without subtitles), music

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