Vocational High School EFL Students’ English Achievement, Willingness to Communicate in English, and Pragmatic Appropriateness

• Main Authors: Chen, Chiao-Ning, 陳巧凝
• Other Authors: Chang, Shan-Mao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/dmerdu

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 106 === This study examined the relationships among vocational high school English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students’ English achievement, willingness to communicate (WTC), and pragmatic appropriateness in terms of speech acts. This study also examined students across different majors to determine if there are significant differences in the performances of requests. It was hypothesized that English achievement, WTC, and pragmatic competence are correlated with each other. Further, students with different majors may show significant differences in their request making and WTC in English. One hundred and ninety-eight EFL learners from a senior high school in central Taiwan participated in the pilot study. Two research instruments were employed to collect data: WTC in English (MacIntyre, Baker, Clément, & Conrod, 2001) and a Multiple-Choice Discourse Completion Task (MDCT) questionnaire composed of 18 request items. The results showed that second-language learners’ WTC, English achievement, and knowledge of making appropriate requests are positively correlated with one another. In this research, English major students have the highest WTC and knowledge of making appropriate requests, followed by the students majoring in Tourism, Japanese, Design, and Computer Science.