The Influence Of Emotional Intelligence,Foreign Language Anxiety And Foreign Language Enjoyment On Junior School Students’ Willingness To Communicate In Second Language

In our modern world,score should no longer be the only standard of students’ achievement.Some scholars claim that the prime goal of second language teaching is to improve students’ willingness to communicate in second language,to cultivate their communicative competence,and to bring them a better life finally.However,existing research indicates the limited effects of cognitive factors on improving willingness to communicate.In order to better achieve this goal,researchers start to study the influence of affective factors on willingness to communicate.Traditional psychology mainly focuses on negative emotions.However,in order to get a whole-rounded picture about students’ emotional feelings,and understand different effects brought by different emotions,researchers turn to study both negative emotions and positive emotions at the same time,such as anxiety and enjoyment.Besides,aiming to restrain the negative emotional effects,and develop the positive emotional effects,people begin to cultivate students’ emotional intelligence consciously.There are some studies focusing on emotional intelligence,foreign language anxiety,foreign language enjoyment and willingness to communicate in second language individually.However,few of them reveal the relationships among these four variables,let alone the mediating effects.In addition,many researchers regard undergraduates as their subjects,instead of junior school students.And previous research draws different conclusions about the relationships among foreign language anxiety,foreign language enjoyment and willingness to communicate in second language.Hence,in order to enrich studies in this field,this research analyses the questionnaires collected from 275 junior school students in Wuhan,to find out the panoramas of Chinese junior school students’ emotional intelligence,foreign language anxiety,foreign language enjoyment and willingness to communicate in second language,and the relationships among them.This research aims to answer the following three research questions:(1)What is the general status of junior school students’ emotional intelligence,foreign language anxiety,foreign language enjoyment and willingness to communicate in second language?(2)What are the correlations between junior school students’ emotional intelligence,foreign language anxiety,foreign language enjoyment and willingness to communicate in second language?(3)Do junior school students’ foreign language anxiety and foreign language enjoyment mediate the relationship between emotional intelligence and willingness to communicate in second language?Then,with SPSS 27.0,we can get the following results:(1)All of the emotional intelligence,foreign language anxiety,foreign language enjoyment and willingness to communicate in second language are at the middle level.(2)There is a significant positive or negative relationship between any two of these variables: a significant positive relationship between EI and FLE,EI and WTC in L2,FLE and WTC in L2;a significant negative relationship between EI and FLA,FLA and WTC in L2,FLA and FLE.(3)Foreign language enjoyment plays the partial mediating role between emotional intelligence and willingness to communicate in second language.While foreign language anxiety is not the mediator.Based on the results,this research provides several suggestions on how to cultivate students’ willingness to communicate in second language,in the hope of promoting students’ communicative competence efficiently.