An Empirical Study On The Chinese University Exchange Students' Willingness To Communicate In English-A Case Study Of Wuhan University Of Science And Technology

This dissertation presents an empirical study of Chinese Exchange Students' willingness to communicate(WTC)in English and its influencing factors on the basis of Mac Intyre et al.'s theories and empirical evidence concerning WTC.To be specific,three research questions were specifically designed as follows:First,what is the general tendency and characteristic of Chinese exchange students' WTC in English?Second,does gender influence Chinese university exchange students' WTC in English?Third,what is the relationship between Chinese university exchange students' WTC and the self-perceived communicative competence(SPCC)?In order to answer the above research questions,the author used both quantitative and qualitative approaches.As for the quantitative approach,a survey was conducted with participation of 106 sophomores and junior exchange students from Wuhan University of Science and Technology(WUST).The questionnaire consists of three parts:(1)Background Information;(2)Willingness to Communicate Inside and Outside the classroom Scale;(3)Exchange Students' SPCC Scale.With respect to the qualitative method,the semistructured interview was employed with 4 exchange students selected from those whose questionnaires are valid.The following part is the findings of the study: For the first question,the general tendency and characteristics of Chinese university exchange students' WTC in English was quite strong,which could be described as “almost always willing”.For the second question,the research results revealed that the gender did not affect Chinese university exchange students' WTC much.As for the third question,exchange students' SPCC has a positive correlation with their foreign language(L2)WTC in a significant way.The results can contribute theoretically,methodologically and pedagogically to L2 WTC field.Meanwhile it may broaden the research findings of English WTC and is believed to have contributions to both English learning and teaching.