Generation Z Students Characteristics and Attitude in a Chinese English Language Teaching Classroom

Abstract

Recently, the notion of Generation Z has been received a wide attention in various academic studies. As the generation who were born and raised in the era of the Internet, digital tools, and social media, Generation Z tend to have different characteristics from the previous generations. In this respect, this paper focuses on providing a better view of Generation Z characteristics and their attitude towards English writing and classroom instructions in an English as foreign language classroom in Yunnan, China. Questionnaires and essay analysis were used to present the experimental Generation Z students opinions and their writing features. The results indicated the experimental Generation Z students have shown both the general characteristics (such as tech savy, multi-taskers) and the typical Chinese characteristics, and that these students had negative attitude to English writing and classroom instructions. As the current English language teaching seems ineffective in meeting the needs of Generation Z students in an L2 English language classroom, this paper concludes that it is urgent for language teachers to find effective methodology to enable the Generation Z students to achieve more in their English language learning practices.