Towards Lessening Learners’Aversive Emotions and Promoting Their Mental Health:Developing and Validating a Measurement of English Speaking Demotivation in the Chinese EFL Context

While a plethora of studies has been conducted to explore demotivation and its impact on mental health in second language(L2)education,scanty research focuses on demotivation in L2 speaking learning.Particularly,little research explores the measures to quantify L2 speaking demotivation.The present two-phase study attempts to develop and validate an English Speaking Demotivation Scale(ESDS).To this end,an independent sample of 207 Chinese tertiary learners of English as a Foreign Language(EFL)participated in the development phase,and another group of 188 Chinese EFL learners was recruited for the validation of the scale.Exploratory Factor Analysis(EFA)and Confirmatory Factor Analysis(CFA)were employed to determine the factor structure of the scale.The EFA results revealed a six-factor solution with Teacher-related Factors in Learning Spoken English(TFLSE),Interest and Valence in Learning Spoken English(IVLSE),Self-efficacy in Learning Spoken English(SELSE),Negative Peer Influence in Learning Spoken English(NPILSE),Undesirable Environment for Learning Spoken English(UELSE),and Negative Influence of Assessment and Learning Materials in speaking class(NIALM).In the validation phase,Confirmatory Factor Analysis(CFA)was performed to validate the internal structure of the scale.The CFA results showed that the model fits the data well.Overall,the ESDS is a robust and trustworthy psychometric tool that could be utilized to examine L2 speaking demotivation.Implications for diminishing EFL learners’demotivation,lessening their aversive emotions and promoting their mental health are also discussed.

How to Create a Low-anxiety Environment for Chinese Learners of EFL to Enhance Oral Proficiency in Speaking Lessons

The goal of teaching English speaking is to improve students' communicative efficiency, or make students speak the target language clearly, coherently, accurately and fluently (Xu, 2005). However, in China, a number of students in an English speaking class tend to be passive and reluctant to speak out or be singled out publicly mainly due to their high anxiety, which, of course, becomes a significant constraint on improving their English proficiency. Therefore, how to create a relaxed atmosphere with a sense of security in the English speaking class to alleviate Chinese learners' anxiety and to provide them with as many opportunities as possible to practice speaking English and improve their English proficiency is one of the central tasks for language teachers.his paper will firstly outline my teaching context in China in physical, pedagogical, institutional and personal aspects. This will be followed by the definition and classification of language learning anxiety, and the analysis of various factors contributing to foreign language learners' anxiety as well as some suggestions of how to reduce the learners' anxiety in the oral class according to the current literature. Finally, some applications will be presented in my teaching context in the hope of decreasing Chinese students' anxiety to enhance their English speaking proficiency.

The Motivations of Chinese EFL Learners

English is regarded as the international language,which makes it the most popular language to learn around the world.Among the many factors that affect the learning outcomes of English language,motivation is broadly considered as one of the most important ones.This paper presents a general review on types of motivation as well as the factors that are linked to motivation.This paper also touches upon some critical issues that Chinese EFL learners face in terms of motivation in English learning.

A Discussion of Foreign Language Listening Problems and Their Causes among Intermediate EFL learners in Chinese universities

Listening has been considered as the most important language skill by many researchers but in Chinese context it has been overlooked for years.The Foreign Language(FL)listening problems gradually reveal when students attend to the Listening Course in universities or colleges.This paper at first illustrates the importance of listening in foreign language learning and provides a discussion on the top-down and bottom-up processes with the analysis of Anderson's three-model of language comprehension[9]as well as the factors affecting listening comprehension in Foreign Language in general,aiming at the illustration of the necessity on one of the bottom-up processes-the Spoken Word Recognition(SWR).The analysis of two issued official guiding documents for Chinese university students and the current situation of English listening teaching in Chinese universities are followed,providing a general background on English listening teaching in Chinese context.Three possible foreign language listening problems and their causes are proposed,followed by the pedagogical suggestions to EFL learners who are improving their listening skills and instructors who are advancing their teaching procedures.

A Development Study on the Ordering Distribution of Temporal Adverbial Clauses by Chinese EFL Learners Based on Dependency Treebank

Temporal adverbial clause is an important language structure and exhibits different features in English and Chinese,which brings about difficulties for Chinese EFL learners.Based on the theory of Dependency Grammar,the study attempts to investigate the ordering distribution of temporal adverbial clauses by Chinese EFL learners at the beginning,intermediate and advanced levels.The results show that:1)Chinese EFL learners at different proficiencies tend to precede temporal adverbial clause to main clause.With the increase of proficiency,the postposition of temporal adverbial clauses by learners increases and is approaching to the ordering preference of target language.2)The ordering distribution of subordinators for temporal adverbial clauses by Chinese EFL learners is consistent with native English,showing a tendency of 100%preposition,which ascribes to the high frequency and salience of subordinators in English.3)MDD is one of the significant motivations that cause the preference of prepositional temporal adverbial clauses by Chinese EFL learners.As a kind of natural language,interlanguage has a unique cognitive mechanism which distinguishes from both native and target language.This study provides a more comprehensive theoretical reference for learners at different proficiencies to understand and learn temporal adverbial clauses,as well as data support from empirical research for language teaching.

How Chinese EFL Learners'English Syntactic Proficiency Regresses with Time:An Empirical Study

The study conducted an empirical study to investigate how Chinese EFL learners'English syntactic proficiency regressed with time.It was indicated that:first,Chinese EFL Learners'proficiency levels prior to attrition(PLPAs)were inversely correlated with the degree of attrition.Simply put,learners with higher syntactic proficiency level will suffer less attrition even if the target structures were not used or rehearsed for more than two years.Second,a critical threshold,which roughly equaled to CET-4 level,was proved to exist in the processing of attrition.Chinese EFL Learners above the critical threshold had a significantly better retention than those below this threshold.

A Comparative Study on Verb-Noun Collocation Errors of Chinese EFL Learners with Different Language Proficiency

This study presents a comparative analysis of verb-noun collocation errors made by Chinese EFL learners with different language proficiency.Linguistic data from two sub-corpora of CLEC(Chinese Learner English Corpus,Gui&Yang,1999)consist of the compositions written freely by Chinese senior high school students(ST2)and the 3rd-and 4th-year English majors of Chinese universities(ST6).The study results show that four types of verb-noun collocation errors are frequently made due to incorrect L1 translation,misuse of relative synonyms,misuse of delexical verbs,and misuse of part of speech;the number of errors decreases with the development of language proficiency,especially errors by incorrect L1 translation and relative synonyms.And for both ST2 and ST6 EFL learners,errors resulted from incorrect L1 translation account for nearly a half with the same high-frequency words.It is also found that ST6 learners’competence in collocation and synonym identification doesn’t grow with the increase of their vocabulary,as is shown in the case of overusing delexical verbs in collocation,the same error made by ST2 learners,who have a significantly weaker command of delexical verbs.Implications of the findings are also discussed with the purpose of raising the awareness of collocation pedagogy and enhancing EFL learners’collocation competence.

Differential effects of teaching approaches on Chinese EFL learners of different writing abilities

To the issue on the superiority and inferiority of the ＂product approach＂ and the ＂process approach＂ writing teaching, an empirical study research of I00 non-English major students has been accomplished to testify the relationship between these different approaches and the different writing levels. The results are the ＂product approach＂ is more helpful to the learners with lower writing level; whereas, the ＂process approach＂ is more effective to ones with higher level. Furthermore, the teaching approach itself cannot affirm the superiority and inferiority, and it would not be at work unless is applied for corresponding learners.

Differences between Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis on English Writing for Chinese EFL learners

With the increasing importance of English writing,how to improve students’writing ability is a big challenge.Contrastive analysis and error analysis are two popular approaches to error correction in English writing.This paper is going to compare the differences between contrastive analysis and error analysis,in English writing for Chinese EFL learners,from perspectives,such as,English writing purpose,English writing errors and attitude towards English writing.After that,some better suggestions will be given at the end of the paper.

A Corpus-based Study on the Use of Affixal Negation in Chinese EFL Learners' Writing

This paper reports a comparative study on the use of affixal negation in the writing of Chinese EFL learners based on data collected from a learner corpus,WECCL and a native-speaker corpus,LOCNESS.The findings revealed that the overall frequency of affixal negation used by Chinese students was nearly the same as that of native speakers.And the top three most frequently used negative affixes of the two groups were the same in terms of their rankings and proportion.However,when it comes to individual negative affixes,some were underused while others overused.The reasons behind were explored in the analysis of un-,dis-and in-,the top three most frequently used negative affixes by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers.Pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research were presented at the end of the paper.

An Investigation into the Vocabulary Learning Strategies of Chinese EFL Learners of High,Average,and Low Proficiency Levels

The current research aims to find out the different beliefs held and different vocabulary strategies employed by nonEnglish majors of different proficiency levels. The data were collected through questionnaire and vocabulary tests. Results revealed that the learners at three levels all adopted wide-ranged strategies. But the high level students had greater vocabulary size and were more believed that words should be learnt through use, and they used more extended dictionary strategies, contextual guessing and note-taking strategies. It is encouraging that teachers should integrate explicit strategy instruction into classroom to help low level students achieve better learning results.

A Corpus-based Study on Writer/reader Visibility in English Writing by Chinese EFL Learners

Writer/reader(W/R) visibility is regarded as an important indicator of personal involvement. Previous studies concluded that EFL learners tend to contains more personal involvement than native speakers in their writing, making it resemble spoken language as a result. Therefore, this paper examines the degree of W/R visibility in English writing by university-level Chinese learners to verify the applicability of the previous findings on Chinese learners. Based on the data collected in the corpora CLEC,WECCL and LOCNESS, the results show that Chinese EFL learners have the tendency to employ more features of W/R visibility than native speakers, for example the high use of first or second person reference and words that represent mental process. Besides, the paper also reveals little distinction on W/R visibility between English and non-English majors, suggesting the inefficiency of the writing ability of today's English majors.

How does Role Play Enhance the Speaking Skills of Chinese EFL Learners?

This paper will focus on how role play activity improves Chinese learners English speaking skills.It starts by shortly in⁃troducing the challenges of oral English teaching in China.Then the definition of role play will be demonstrated.Next,a literature review regarding role play teaching in China will be shown.Furthermore,some wise advice and implication about how to organize and implement role play activity in a Chinese class will be discussed.Ultimately,the conclusion will sum up the main points of this paper.

Obstacles for Chinese EFL Learners to Improve Speech Intelligibility

As the primary means of communication,speech is an essential aspect for humans to interact and build connections in the social world.Speech intelligibility is critical in social communication;unintelligibility may lead to confusion,misunderstanding,and frustration.Many Chinese learners of English find it challenging to apply English into social interaction and reach mutual intelligibility with international communicators.This article analyzes the obstacles impeding Chinese EFL learners’speech intelligibility development,from the aspects of phonology(segmental and suprasegmental features)and pragmatics.Some strategies are proposed to help Chinese learners ameliorate phonology and pragmatics problems and improve speech intelligibility in English communication.

A Pragmatic Analysis of the Negative Transfer in Chinese EFL Learners

This paper analyzes the accuracy and appropriacy of the recorded data from a group of Chinese-speaking English learners who has finished three communicative tasks set in different contexts.It also tries to find out how the participants' learning history and the present Chinese EFL context influence their performance.The results suggest that the participants rely on a limited set of request,apology,and refusal strategies.And it is evident that low-level learners often refer to their L1 for sentence constructions and lexical items.Although the evidence is still fragmentary,enough exists to indicate that transfer involving discourse can often occur in foreign language acquisition.

A Study on the Correlations Between Chinese EFL Learners' Autonomous Learning and Their Cooperative Learning

Cooperative learning and learner autonomy have become heated topics in English teaching.Many researchers both at home and abroad have carried out the study on this field,and they proved that learner autonomy and cooperative learning are rel evant,cooperative learning can promote English majors’learning autonomy in terms of listening,reading,speaking,however,no obvious findings in vocabulary and writing.This study is conducted to prove the feasibilities and effectiveness of cooperative learning applied to foster first-year non-English majors’learning autonomy from the aspect of vocabulary and structure.The re sults of this study showed that cooperative learning was much more effective than traditional teaching approaches in fostering some positive affective factors.According to this research,cooperative learning can also improve learners’vocabulary and struc ture significantly.

An Analysis on English Relative Clauses Acquisition in Spoken Context of Chinese College English Majored Learners

This study investigated the relative clauses acquisition of Chinese EFL Learners in spoken context.207 English major sophomores’spoken data selected from the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners were analyzed.All the par ticipants were divided into high and low group according to their oral proficiency.This study found that high proficiency stu dents outperformed low proficiency students not only in the numbers of RCs also in accuracy.Meanwhile,the RCs produced in the spoken context also supported previous accessibility hierarchy hypotheses on processing RCs,and the regression results showed that OS and OOGen types of RCs were strong predictors of spoken proficiency.However,because of the typological dif ference of RC between Chinese and English,four types of RC errors were found.This study expected to provide some pedagogi cal insights into English RC acquisition in spoken context.

Interlanguage Fossilization in Chinese EFL Writing --An Empirical Research of 20 English Major Students

This research is designed to investigate interlanguage fossilization in Chinese college students＇ written output. Twelve common linguistic errors from 20 Chinese EFL （English as a foreign language） learners＇ writing assignments are observed. Results show that among 12 typical errors, five types of errors are declining while the rest are increasing, indicating a tendency towards fossilization. Analysis shows that negative/corrective feedback has played a key role in reducing fossilization of some errors, but it does not work in every case. Some errors tend to be fossilized for several reasons. First, language items that do not have a direct form-function relationship are likely to be fossilized. Second, advanced learners create their own language system and neglect the basic rules of grammar. Third, task difficulty takes learners＇ attention away from form to meaning. Fourth, ingrained thinking patterns have a great impact on how learners organize their thoughts in writing. It is true that many Chinese EFL advanced learners reach a plateau in the process of acquiring English. However, attention, consciousness, and training of self-monitoring ability will help destabilize their interlanguage system.

A Survey of Adverbial Connectors in EFL Learners' Writing:A Comparative Study

Through a comparative study of the use of ACs (ACs) in EFL learners' writing at different English writing proficiency, Chinese EFL learners' use of ACs are analyzed with the hope to provide valuabe suggestions in Enligh writing teaching and learning.

The Effect of Metacognitive Strategies Instruction on Chinese Non-Major Undergraduates' Self-efficacy and Writing Performance

Metacognition has drawn wider research attention in the past decades in the field of teaching English as a foreign language. In this study, questionnaires surveying English learners' use of metacognitive writing strategies and their writing efficacy were respectively administered. Metacognitive writing strategy intervention was conducted The findings are further discussed with regard to the participants' specific learning context, and pedagogical implications derived from the research highlight the importance of integrating metacognitive writing strategy instruction into regular classroom teaching.