Zhiming Yang

Thesis title: The Impact of Teaching Compensation Strategies on English Major Vocational Students’ Willingness to Communicate and Anxiety

Email: pszyan15@liverpool.ac.uk

Supervisors: Primary supervisor (90%): Dr. Christian Jones, Secondary supervisor (10%): Dr. David Oakey

Biography: Zhiming Yang earned a MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages at University of Liverpool in 2018. She is currently a PGR student at the University of Liverpool where the focus of her research is to investigate the impact of communication strategies on lower-level English learners’ willingness to speak English and anxiety of using English in China.

Research Interests: Zhiming is specifically interested in teaching English to speaker of other languages (TESOL) and second language acquisition (SLA). She is keen to do research around strategic competence, especially communication strategies, individual differences for example willingness to communicate and language anxiety. She has a catholic tastes of language and how it interacts with politics, gender, and different social groups, so her current research is mainly focus on a specific social group in China – vocational college students—which is usually ignored from the public. She wants to know whether teaching communication strategies to college students would influence their willingness and their anxiety.