A Structural Equation Modeling Of Chinese Art Students' Willingness To Communicate In College English Class

The present study,by virtue of investigating the willingness to communicate in College English classes and its underlying variables,constructed the complex interrelationship among Chinese Art students' willingness to communicate,foreign language classroom anxiety and classroom environment.The pyramid model about L2 WTC proposed by MacIntyre and his colleagues(1998)laid a solid theoretical foundation for the present study,referring to the cultural interpretation of Wen and Clément(2003)on Chinese English learners' unwillingness to communicate to analyze the research results.Based on the related literature and previous empirical studies,a hypothesized model was proposed to explore the correlation among these three variables together and verified in this study.According to the hypothesized model(Peng and Woodrow,2010;Khajavy et al,2016),three hypotheses were drawn.The first one was that foreign language classroom anxiety could predict Art students' willingness to communicate in College English classes;the second hypothesis showed that classroom environment could directly affect Art students' willingness to communicate in College English classes;the last one was that classroom environment could also indirectly predict Art students' willingness to communicate in College English classes through the inter-mediating effect of foreign language classroom anxiety.This thesis employed the quantitative method complemented by qualitative data to test the above three hypotheses.First,the questionnaire in the present study is adapted from the scales recognized at home and abroad,and were administrated to the 271 freshmen from Faculty of Art in Hubei University.And as a result,there were 250 valid samples in total.Among them,9 students were invited to participate in the semi-structured interviews for three weeks.The quantitative data of questionnaires were dealt with and analyzed through SPSS20.0 and AMOS 20.0.The reliability of each scale was examined and the hypothesized modelwas modified and tested through structural equation model.On the other hand,the data from interviews were also transcribed carefully and analyzed by virtue of content analysis.Combining the quantitative data with qualitative data together,two findings were revealed.One finding was related to the three hypotheses that classroom environment could not only directly but also indirectly predict the Art students' willingness to communicate in College English classes through the inter-mediating effect of foreign language classroom anxiety.The other one was that apart from these two important factors,the participants also mentioned many other variables playing a crucial role in their willingness to communicate in College English classes,such as confidence,personality,personal emotion,motivation,English learning experience and so on.These findings can be somewhat beneficial for teachers to interpret their students' classroom behavior and further improve the efficiency of classroom instruction.