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

The emphasis of English education in China has gradually focused on the development of students' communicative competence in English from Exam-oriented Education.Mac Intyre(1998: 547)defined Willingness to Communicate(WTC)in the second language as “a readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a special person or persons,using a L2”.Learners' WTC in L2 influences their communication and performance in language communication.Therefore,stimulating English learners' WTC is a key to improve their communication competence.Studies on WTC at home are mainly on the characteristics of students' WTC in English and the relationships between variables.And most participants of these studies are college students.There's less attention paid to senior high school students.Based on the theoretical models of Mac Intyre et al.'s heuristic model and Wen & Clément's conceptualization of WTC under the background of foreign language learning in China,the present study makes a relatively systematic investigation into the characteristics of senior high school students' WTC in English classroom and explores their influencing factors,taking Tongwei No.1 Senior High School as an example.It aims at getting a deep and comprehensive understanding about senior high school students' WTC in English classroom,investigating and analyzing the reasons for the characteristics.It is hoped that the study can reveal the existing problems in senior high school students' English communication and urge teachers to reflect their teaching methods in order to improve students' communicative competence.The following are research questions.(1)What are the characteristics of senior high school students' WTC in English classroom?(2)What factors have an effect on senior high school students' WTC in English classroom?(3)How can we improve senior high school students' WTC in English classroom?In the present study,the researcher chose 120 high school students of Grade one and their two English teachers of Tongwei No.1 Senior High School as the subjects,and then conducted quantitative and qualitative studies through questionnaire,class observation and interview.After that,the author analyzed the data by the software of SPSS,and transferred the interview.The conclusions of the study are as follows.(1)The levels of senior high school students' WTC in English classroom reach the degree of being willing to communicate between “sometimes” and “half of the time”,and the levels of WTC in English classroom of female students are significantly higher than those of male students.Besides,there is significant difference in the two class in students' WTC.(2)The factors influencing students' WTC in English classroom can be categorized into individual factors which may include learners' self-perceivedcommunication competence,anxiety,personality,self-confidence,motivation,attitude,English proficiency,face and so on;and situational factors which may include class atmosphere,teaching method,teacher,and classroom activities and so on;(3)Teachers can improve students' WTC in English classroom by giving students more encouragement and positive evaluations,introducing more cultural knowledge,designing more interesting activities,and providing more opportunities to speak English and so on.Based on the above results,the present study also proposes some implications: senior high school students should evaluate their own communicative competence positively,try to improve English proficiency,and develop their own interests in English consciously;teachers should give more positive feedback,provide more chances to communicate,and try their best to teach in English;However,some limitations still exist in the present study which remains to be explored further.