A Study Of Influential Factors Of Non-English Major Freshmen’s Willingness To Communicate In English In The Classroom In Vocational Colleges

As a foreign language, English is mainly learned in the classroom in China. In theEnglish classroom, teachers often find a kind of embarrassing phenomenon---moststudents are unwilling to speak English in the classroom. Studies find that thephenomenon is led by students’ willingness to communicate (WTC). Willingness tocommunicate has a close relationship with learners’ English learning. Therefore, inrecent years, willingness to communicate has received great attention in ChineseEnglish teaching. Nowadays, there are more and more vocational colleges. Vocationaleducation is different from other higher education. Vocational college students havetheir characteristics. However, Chinese vocational college students’ WTC still have notbeen studied at home and abroad. So based on both Maclntyre&Charo’s (1996) modelof L2WTC and Wen&Clement’s (2003) WTC model, the present study focuses on theinfluential factors of non-English major freshmen’s WTC in the English classroom invocational colleges.This study chose randomly262non-English major freshmen in Wuhan TechnicalCollege of Communications. The research instrument consisted of a questionnaire andinterviews. The questionnaire was composed of basic information of the subjects, WTCscale in the classroom, self-perceived communication competence (SPCC) scale,classroom anxiety scale, learning motivation scale and teacher immediacy scale. Thecollected data was carried out by quantitative analysis. To be specific, it mainly includeddescriptive statistics, pearson correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis. Inorder to get a comprehensive understanding on the influential factors of students’ WTC,the interviews were made with25students and10teachers respectively. Students’ andteachers’ answers were classified respectively by qualitative analysis.The results from quantitative analysis showed as follows.1) Non-English major freshmen’s WTC in English in the classroom in vocationalcolleges was low.2) Significant positive correlations were found between WTC and SPCC, and learningmotivation. However, classroom anxiety was significantly negatively related with WTC.SPCC was the best predictor of students’ WTC in the English classroom. 3) Teacher immediacy was positively related to students’ WTC in the Englishclassroom.In addition, from the students’ interviews, we found the main factors that led totheir low willingness to communicate, including limited English proficiency,classmates’ negative evaluation, teachers’ influence, classroom atmosphere andinfluence from examination-oriented education system. From the teachers’ interview, wefound the main factors that led to students’ low willingness to communicate, includingheavy teaching contents and limited time in the class, limited communication withstudents after class, and pressure from the English level test. The results of qualitativeanalysis proved and supplemented the results of quantitative research.Based on the quantitative and qualitative results, this study proposed somesuggestions for improving freshmen’s WTC in English in the classroom in vocationalcolleges.