Facilitating Willingness To Communicate In English Class In Junior High School

Willingness to Communicate(WTC)has attracted more and more attention in the last several years.How to facilitate students' WTC and enhance their communicative competence has become the hot issue of English teaching in China nowadays.Researchers who study WTC primarily focus on college students' WTC.However,few researchers have paid attention to the WTC of junior high school students.The current study investigates junior middle school students' WTC in English class.Through questionnaires and interviews,this paper explores the influencing factors of WTC in English,and the teaching strategies to facilitate junior high school students' WTC in English class.The researcher used practical research to investigate 58 junior high school students from Grade 7 in Guangzhou.During this process the research mainly went through four stages:planning,action observation and reflection.By means of questionnaires,interviews and classroom observation,the study identifies five specific factors affecting junior high school students' WTC:(1)teachers' effective questioning in the classroom;(2)effective classroom evaluation feedback;(3)students' emotions;(4)students' learning motivation;(5)classroom atmosphere.This study has several pedagogical implications.Firstly,teachers can trv to facilitate students' WTC by improving questioning skills and giving timely and specific teaching evaluations.Secondly,students' self-confidence can be improved by transforming learning motivation and building a close and harmonious relationship with teachers.