The Influence Of Situational Variables And Students’ Personality Types On Willingness To Communicate In English Class

L2 learners’ willingness to communicate(WTC)plays an inevitable role in the cultivation of communicative competence and the improvement of English proficiency.With the deepening of curriculum reform,the cultivation of middle school students’ oral English communicative competence has been highlighted in Chinese compulsory education.The fact shows that the study of students’ WTC in oral English is one of the important topics in English teaching.However,with the implementation of junior high school English curriculum standards,junior students show varying degrees of WTC in oral English.And the recent research,especially for the WTC in oral English is relatively scarce,so it is necessary to investigate junior high school students’ oral WTC in English class.The purpose of this study is to investigate and explore the influence of situational variables and personality tendencies on junior high school students’ willingness to communicate in English class:(1)to clarify whether there are differences in students’ WTC under the influence of four situational variables,namely teacher-class interaction,teacher-individual interaction,dyadic interaction and group interaction;(2)to explore whether there are differences in WTC under the influence of different personality variables;(3)to explore whether there are differences in students’ WTC under the influence of different situational variables and personality variables;(4)to analyze whether there is a correlation among students’ WTC,their personality types and four situational factors.Based on the theory of WTC,this study takes 301 junior high school students in Deyang city as research objects.From the perspective of situational variables and personality type variables,this paper makes an empirical study on middle school students’ oral WTC in English class by taking advance of a questionnaire,SPSS23.0 and Amos 21.0 that are used to deal with quantitative data analysis.The results show that:(1)under the influence of four different situational variables,there are significant differences in students’ oral WTC;(2)under the influence of eight different personality variables,there are no significant differences in students’ oral WTC,and under the influence of different situational variables,students with different personalities also show no significant differences in oral WTC;(3)there is a significant correlation between the four situational variables and students’ WTC,but there is no significant correlation between the other seven personality types and WTC,except the emotional inclination,and personality types have an influence on class situation to a certain extent.Finally,according to the above quantitative data and qualitative information,this thesis puts forward some countermeasures and suggestions of teaching on how to stimulate students’ oral WTC in English and improve the level of oral English.