The Study Of High School Students' Willingness To Communicate In English Classroom

As the best predictor of communication behavior, willingness to communicate (WTC) has received more and more attention in recent years. How to motivate students'WTC has become the principal task in the present English teaching. With few exceptions, earlier researches focused on the WTC of college students as well as its relation to other variables. However, the results are difficult to extend to learners with other backgrounds, as age may be an important variable related to WTC.In view of the above questions, this thesis addresses the WTC as well as its related variables of high school students from grade 7 to 12. Questionnaire is first used to describe the general picture of high school students'WTC. And then, observation and interview are taken into use to explore the potential antecedents and consequences of it.The following conclusions have been generalized from the results. First, compared with speaking and writing, high school students are more willing to read and comprehend in English. Second, the correlations between WTC and perceived competence are significant. However, no significant correlation between WTC and anxiety is found for Chinese middle school students, which is contrary to previous findings. Third, friend support and classmate support are two major social supports to be correlated positively with WTC. And the correlation is influenced by age. Forth, different age-leveled students are not significantly different in terms of WTC and relevant variables, except anxiety. Fifth, the variables exerting influences on WTC of high school students are as follows: language proficiency, motivation, face idea, learning experience, others'judgments, risk-taking and task difficulty.On the basis of these findings, some pedagogical implications have been proposed. Teachers should take some measures to help students form strong motivation, enough self-confidence and weak face idea. Some other means should be taken to arouse students'interests, such as to design tasks with multi-leveled difficulties and to increase the attractiveness of English class. Meanwhile, it is necessary to encourage students to help each other and adjust teachers'role in English class. The above suggestions are in the hope of promoting the development of China's English teaching and the reform of new curriculums.