Action Research On Improving Rural High School Students' Willingness To Communicate In English ——Intervention Strategies Based On Positive Psychology

One of the basic objectives of language teaching is to facilitate learners' classroom communication and interaction,so as to cultivate their communicative competence.Logically,as a prerequisite to communication practice,learners need to have willingness to communicate(WTC)before engaging in L2 interaction.Learners with high L2 WTC seek out more opportunities to involve in L2 communication,which facilitates their L2 acquisition.Therefore,it can be seen that cultivating students' English WTC is of great significance to cultivate students' English core competences.However,many rural schools usually only regard English as an examination subject and classroom teaching lacks the cultivation of emotional perception and motivation orientation to stimulate students' WTC in English as well as the creation of societal context to facilitate students' WTC in English.Therefore,students' low WTC in English is a serious problem that rural high school teachers have to be confronted with.The researches of positive psychology(hereafter referred to as Pos Psy)are mainly based on three pillars: positive subjective experience,positive individual traits,and positive institutions.Coincidentally,the main variables of Wen ? Clément's(2003)model of L2 WTC mainly include societal context,personality factors,motivational orientation and affective perceptions.To some extent,the two fit well together.At the same time,many studies have confirmed the positive impact of Pos Psy on the psychological process of second language learning.Therefore,it was hypothesized that positive psychology-based intervention strategies could improve rural high school students' WTC in English.In order to test this hypothesis,this study adopted the paradigm of action research,attempting to answer the following questions:1)Can positive subjective experience-based intervention strategies cultivate the affective perceptions and motivational orientation which facilitate rural high school students' WTC in English ?2)Can positive institutions-based intervention strategies create the societal context which facilitates rural high school students' WTC in English?3)Can positive psychology-based intervention strategies improve rural high school students' WTC in English?In order to verify the hypothesis,before the action research,the author took 50 students in the rural high school where the author worked as the research participants,and conducted an investigation on their status of communicating in English classroom.The investigation result showed that the overall WTC of the research participants was low.Based on the findings,the author tried to adopt Pos Psy theories to intervene in the classroom teaching to promote students' WTC in English.In order to achieve the above research objectives,the author conducted two rounds of action research,lasting 16 weeks.Research data were collected through questionnaires,interviews,classroom observations,teaching journals.Data were processed and analyzed by text analysis and SPSS 26.0software.Through the processing of multidimensional data,the following results were obtained:1)Positive subjective experience-based intervention strategies can cultivate the affective perceptions and motivational orientation which facilitate rural high school students' WTC in English.2)Positive institutions-based intervention strategies can create the societal context which facilitates rural high school students' WTC in English.3)Positive psychology-based intervention strategies have significantly improved rural high school students' WTC in English(p<0.05).Meanwhile,students' English interest and English self-efficacy have also been improved to a large extent and their English communication anxiety has been greatly reduced,thus improving students' WTC in English and increasing their classroom communication frequency.