Abstract
This paper reports on a one year, mixed-methods longitudinal case study investigating the neglected area of the perceived reasons why participants forget vocabulary knowledge. The participants were 43 fourth year male Saudi EFL majors at King Abdulaziz University KAU, Saudi Arabia. Quantitative and qualitative data including self-reported questionnaires and retrospective semi-structured interviews offered evidence to support the findings of this study. The reasons associated with lexical attrition centered on lack of practice, instructional and environmental context and nature of the word.
Highlights
1.1 Statement of the ProblemA remarkable amount of research has been carried out in the field of language teaching and learning
The results show that there are many different kinds of reasons perceived by the study participants to contribute to their lexical attrition
The reasons given to some extent overlap, they are grouped under three main categories:
Summary
1.1 Statement of the ProblemA remarkable amount of research has been carried out in the field of language teaching and learning. Further fundamental concerns have been raised by attrition researchers (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig & Stringer, 2010; Weltens & Cohen, 1989; Weltens & Grendel, 1993) concerning the variety of factors suggested as influences on the emergence of first, second and foreign language attrition in general and of vocabulary in particular. To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, little is known about the reasons for vocabulary attrition by Saudi EFL majors, and is in need of attention from applied linguistics researchers. Readers’ attention, should be drawn here to the difference between forgetting and loss Scholars such as Weltens and Grendel (1993) preferred to use the term forgetting to the term loss since the deterioration is not permanent but the vocabulary item inaccessible. In the light of language attrition research, Cohen’s (1989, p. 147) investigation of loss of productive vocabulary by bilingual children in Portuguese as a third language concluded that, “these words were not lost from memory but that the memory links were increasingly blocked by other interfering material, preventing the production of the desired words from one storytelling section to the ”
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