| Willingness to communicate has been widely developed in the field of second language acquisition and has gained increasing attention in the field of foreign language teaching.Current research on L2 willingness to communicate mainly focuses on its individual influencing factors such as learning motivation,communicative anxiety,and communicative confidence as well as situational influencing factors like teacher factors,familiarity with the interlocutor and topic.Teacher immediacy,as a key situational factor influencing students’ L2 willingness to communicate,scholars at home and abroad have focused more on its effects on students’ learning,but less on the relationship between teacher immediacy and students’ L2 willingness to communicate in senior high school.Therefore,in this regard and based on Swain’s(1985)output hypothesis,Wen &Clément’s(2003)conceptualization of WTC in a Chinese setting,and Zhang et al.’s(2018)framework of L2 state WTC,this study tends to investigate the correlation between teacher’s classroom immediacy and L2 willingness to communicate of senior high school students,then proposing suggestions and recommendations for optimizing teachers immediacy based on the findings so as to help students improve their L2 WTC and thus enhance their English communicative competence.Accordingly,the research questions of this study are as follows:(1)What is the overall status quo of teacher’s classroom immediacy?(2)What is the overall status quo of senior high school students’ L2 WTC?(3)Is there any correlation between teacher’s classroom immediacy and senior high school students’ L2 WTC? If so,what is the correlation? This study adopts questionnaires which cover three scales,i.e.willingness to communicate scale,verbal teacher immediacy scale and nonverbal teacher immediacy scale and semi-structure interviews as research instruments.165 students from a senior high school in Guigang,Guangxi participated in the questionnaire surveys.After arranging the results of the questionnaire,2 students were selected from each of the three levels(high,medium and low)of willingness to communicate,and a total of 6 students participated in the interview,which aims to further explore how teacher’s classroom immediacy is related to students’ L2 WTC in senior high school and get relevant insights on how to optimize teacher immediacy to help students improve their L2 WTC.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1)The overall use of teacher’s classroom immediacy perceived by students is relatively high on average.Moreover,both dimensions of teacher immediacy,namely verbal immediacy and nonverbal immediacy are used to a relatively high extent.However,compared with verbal immediacy,nonverbal immediacy is used more frequently.(2)Senior high school students’ L2 WTC remains at a moderate level.Most of them are willing to communicate with others in English in class.(3)There is a moderately positive correlation between teacher’s classroom immediacy and senior high school students’ L2 WTC.It means that the more the students perceive teacher immediacy,the more frequently they are willing to communicate with others.In addition,there is also a significantly positive correlation between the dimensions of teacher immediacy and senior high school students’ L2 WTC.Among them,verbal teacher immediacy has a relatively higher correlation with student’s L2 WTC.Based on the findings,this study proposes some suggestions and recommendations on how to optimize teacher’s classroom immediacy to improve student’s L2 WTC: Regarding verbal immediacy,teachers are supposed to develop the educational concept of student-centered,provide students with more opportunities for language output and encourage them to communicate with their peers.Meanwhile,teachers are expected to consider students’ previous experience,task difficulty,and the communicative topics that can arouse their interest.What’s more,teachers should give students more praise,positive feedback and use humor in class.As for nonverbal immediacy,teachers can use proper gestures,make more eye contact with students,and move around the classroom appropriately to reduce the distance with students.Additionally,teachers ought to provide more smiles,be lively and passionate when giving lectures and use appropriate body movements such as patting students on shoulders to show affirmation or encouragement. |
