Willingness to Communicate in the Chinese EFL University Classroom

At the Fifth International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), a teacher-researcher brought up the issue that Chinese students did not like to mingle with students from other L1 backgrounds but stayed within L1 Chinese groups. That caused hot debate on the stereotype of Chinese students as ‘quiet’ and ‘shy’ students, who did not like to communicate with other L1 speakers in language classrooms. This book discusses Chinese university students’ willingness to communicate (WTC) in L2 classrooms, by adopting a second language acquisition (SLA) perspective, a cultural perspective, and an ecological perspective. Although Peng does not claim to adopt what Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008) describe as a complexity approach, this work resembles that approach and looks into various aspects of language development, offering a lively example of research into a complex system consisting of multiple variables in dynamic and interdependent relations and thus challenging a stereotype based on reductionism. While it is research conducted in the Chinese context, which is ‘monolingual’ and ‘monocultural’ in the author’s view, the findings shed light on understanding Chinese students’ performance and behaviour in multilingual and multicultural language classrooms in terms of the cognitive, cultural, and environmental influences on their WTC in English.