A Study On English Major Graduates’ Willingness To Communicate In English Inside And Outside Of Classroom

In modern times, people pay more attention to the actual utility of English, as a result, it is particularly important for students to have higher willingness to communicate of English both inside and outside of class. The ultimate goal of learning English is communication, but a lot of factors negatively affects on the cultivation of students’ WTC. Although foreign studies of WTC are very rich, the researches on WTC are still in a exploratory stage in China, especially the studies about college students in English major. In addition, most researchers took undergraduates as subjects in their studies, and ignored the graduates. Above all, it is necessary to conduct a study about English graduates’ WTC.In this paper, the author discussed English major graduates’ willingness to communicate based on the pyramid model of Mac Intyre et al. and Wen. The author investigated 280 English graduates who came from Hebei Normal University and Wuhan University, and adopted questionnaire and semi-structure interview as research tools. This study mainly discussed the relationship between WTC and its influencing factors, such as the starting age of learning English, self-perceived communicative competence, real language proficiency. On the basis of existing literature, this study focuses on the three specific research questions as following:First, what is the general picture of English major graduates’ willingness to communicate in English inside and outside the classroom?Second, do gender, starting age of learning English, and their language proficiency influence students’ WTC? If do, to what extent?Third, what is the relationship between students’ WTC and their self-perceived communicative competence?The author performed a statistical analysis on the data which collected from questionnaires, and reached the following conclusions:First of all, the overall condition about WTC in English of Chinese graduates is strong, but there are some individuals who show obvious differences in it. A majority of the respondents are willingness to communicate in various occasions, which showed in the questionnaire. And there are still respondents keep silence in facing of certain communication occasions, such as encountering a foreigner.In addition, the gender doesn’t affect graduates’ WTC much. The number of male is far less than female among the subject in this study. The females’ performances are a little better than males’, but there exists no significant difference in statistics. At the same time, as the data shows, the starting age of learning English has little impact on their WTC. Graduates’ WTC with high language proficiency are higher than those who with low language proficiency.What’s more, the WTC of these respondents who showed higher level of SPCC, is higher. Otherwise, WTC is showed lower.The author investigated the general picture of English graduates’ WTC in English in this study. It enriched the research findings of English WTC and is believed to benefit English instruction. Moreover, in order to make a better understanding about English graduates’ WTC in English, more quantitative and qualitative researches should be done.