Foreign Student Extracurricular Chinese Usage

This study tries to investigate the international students’ extracurricular communication in Chinese in the target language context and correlation between the variables that affecting their communication in Chinese. Specifically, the research objective included:1) to have a general look at the international students’ involvement in Chinese people’s activities, people contact very often, and their extracurricular communication frequency in Chinese;2) following the WTC in L2theory, to explore in which degree can the three variables---willingness to communicate, self-perceived communication competence and motivation predict international students’ communication in Chinese, and affect the other two variables.3) to offer a proposal to promote international students’ willingness to communicate in Chinese and make full use of the target language context.Based on above research object, a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative methods was adopted in present study. Seven parts of the questionnaires were used to gather information about international students’personal information, involvement in Chinese people’s life, communication frequency in Chinese, self-perceived communication competence, willingness to communicate in Chinese and motivation. Semi-structured interview were used to explore the more concrete obstacles stop international students from using Chinese or initiate communication with Chinese.The major findings showed that:1) Generally, international students’ contact with Chinese people’s life is optimistic, with the improvement of learner’s competence in a L2, students’ contact with target language context demonstrated more frequently while the individual difference became smaller gradually.2) In the target language environment, gender and culture background were found not significantly correlated with communication frequency, WTC in Chinese, self-perceived communication competence and motivation.3) Self-perceived communication competence and WTC showed high correlation with communication frequency. WTC was the best predictor of communication frequency and followed by self-perceived communication competence.4) The reason why international students avoid using Chinese is not just one or several aspects, but a mixed of personal difference (lacking communication motivation, language competence) and external factors (lack of social support and opportunities), as the complex nature of the system of communication in second language.5) Before we’ve examined the positive correlation of language using and language acquisition, blindly advocate frequent communication in second language is inappropriately. We should also take international students social needs and culture identity under intercultural context into consideration.