A Study On Willingness To Communicate In English Inside And Outside The Classroom Of Chinese College Non-English Majors

As the emphasis in modern language education has been shifting to authentic communication, willingness to communicate (WTC) plays an important role in accounting for individual’s second language communication. To be more specific, it is to solve the problem of why some L2 learners seek every opportunity to speak a second language despite of minimal linguistic knowledge, while some others try to avoid using a second language even if they possess high linguistic competence.The present study examined WTC inside and outside the classroom using MacIntyre’s heuristic model and Wen’s WTC Model. The study investigated the influence of affective variables on willingness to communicate inside and outside the classroom and proved the relationship between the willingness to communicate inside and outside the classroom and English communicative frequency.The participants of this study were 200 undergraduate non-English freshmen from two universities in China:Zhejiang Sci-Tech University (144) and Heilongjiang University (56), which can be regarded as representatives from the South and the North of China.The instruments used in this research included willingness to communicate inside the classroom scale, willingness to communicate outside the classroom scale, English communication anxiety scale, English learning motivation scale, English communicative frequency scale, self-perceived communicative competence scale. SPSS 14.0 was administered to computer the data collected. Descriptive statistics, Scatter plot, Pearson product-moment correlation, and Stepwise multiple regression were used to analyze the data.The present study enriches the research of the willingness to communicate in second language learning and is believed to benefit college English teaching in China.