A Study On Senior High School Students’ Willingness To Communicate And The Influential Factors In English Class

As a communication tool, English emphasizes the importance of language output. However, most of Chinese students are used to learning English by reading or reciting, thus they rarely have the opportunity to speak English. This long-term way of language learning, therefore, will affect the usage of English in the classroom. Moreover, it may let some students unwilling to communicate in English. Therefore, the study focus on the willingness to communicate in English class can not only improve students’ classroom participation, but make the students grasp the opportunity for classroom language communication spontaneously.The Willingness to Communicate(WTC) in English class reflects students’ psychological state and classroom situation where they are willing or unwilling to use English to communicate. Studies on WTC started relatively late in China, mainly focused on college students, while little attention has been given to high school students who are unwilling to communicate in English. Therefore, the present study had 288 students and 11 teachers from No. 1 middle school and No. 3 middle school, Zhengning county, Gansu province, as participants. A set of questionnaires were delivered and interviews were made to investigate the present status of high school students’ WTC in English class, and to examine the factors which affect high school students’ willingness to communicate.Our study shows that high school students’ WTC in English class was generally low; a correlational study and a regressional one reveal significant correlations between high school students’ willingness to communicate and their self-perceived communicate competence, classroom anxiety, learning motivation and teacher immediacy, in specific, high school students’ willingness to communicate in English class has a significant positive correlation with self-perceived communicate competence, learning motivation and teacher immediacy, but has a significant negative correlation with classroom anxiety. And among these correlational factors, self-perceived communicate competence and anxiety are the best predictors of high school English learners’ willingness to communicate.