Abstract:
This paper reports the findings of an experiment designed to measure English language article
and preposition attrition of twenty Saudi Arabian teachers of English as a foreign language. Ten of the
subjects were trained in an ESL environment (the United Kingdom) and ten in an EFL environment (the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). For each subject, two English-teaching classes were audio-taped. Deviations
in the use of articles and prepositions are analyzed. The results indicate: (1) while previous attrition
studies had suggested that preposition attrition is more prominent than that of other types of function
words, such as articles. this was not the case in this study, where the two categories were attrited at basi-
cally the same rate, and (2) whether training environment is ESL or EFL did not appear to affect the man-
ifested attrition of articles and prepositions since incidences and types of article and preposition errors
were basically the same for both groups. A tentatively-offered conclusion of this study is that the more
semantically-based an item is, the less likely it is to undergo attrition,
Weltens and Cohen write, “There is no question that far more work has been done
on the learning of a second or foreign language than on its loss, and yet the loss of
such languages is as common a phenomenon as is learning” [1, p. 132]. Language
attrition/loss/regression/reversion/erosion (the terms are used interchangeably in the
literature) occurs, Olshtain writes, whenever there is “a change in the linguistic envi-
ronment” or “the