**7. Conclusion**

The present study investigated the interaction between expectancy-value beliefs (attainment, intrinsic, utility and cost value) and AOC anxiety in Chinese postgraduate EFL learners. Analyses of 74 matching sets of questionnaires and seven interviews at two points of a 16-week semester revealed the following major findings:


Clearly, Chinese postgraduate students' AOC anxiety and expectancyvalue beliefs did change during the Advanced Speaking Course for Academic Communication, though not so much as happened in courses of speaking English for general purposes. This further demonstrates the challenging and anxietyprovoking nature of courses of speaking English for academic purposes. To improve competence in AOC and reduce anxiety, it is important to enhance students' motivation to learn AOC in English. Coupled with the finding that intrinsic value and cost value were powerful predictors for students' AOC by the end of the semester, it is necessary for instructors and students to work together to develop proper expectancy of success about and place appropriate values on AOC in English. Thus, students know what they expect to achieve, how they can achieve their goals and what sacrifices they are willing to make to achieve those goals. With these goals and efforts, they may gradually improve their competence in AOC and become increasingly more confident in and less anxious about speaking English for academic purposes [12]. Meanwhile, exposure to and practice of AOC in English are of supreme importance to students, which can be realized by organizing and participating in various activities like presentations and group discussions in class and listening to and modelling on formal speeches like TED talks after class [3, 4]. In addition to this, a cooperative and supportive classroom environment helps reduce anxiety and increase the comfort of speaking English for academic purposes, as discussed in [3]. Moreover, as timely and constant feedback fuels learning motivation [71, 72], it is important for instructors to give feedback on students' performance and encourage them to do peer review as well, so that students can be cognizant of their learning progress timely and be informed how to do better effectively. All of these can in return develop students' interest in the language and foster intrinsic motivation to learn AOC, which is likely to elicit more efforts from the students to invest in AOC.

## *The Interaction of Expectancy-Value Beliefs and Anxiety in Learning Academic Oral English… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98181*

Consequently, they become more proficient in the second/foreign language during the process of becoming bilingual/multilingual.

The present study enriched the current literature by examining the interaction of expectancy-value beliefs and anxiety in relation to learning academic oral English in bilingual Chinese graduates. The findings would be more generalizable if a larger sample had been studied. An experimental design would have also helped reveal a causal relationship between expectancy-value beliefs and AOC anxiety and the effects of training. All these will be the focus of future research. As reviewed in [2, 42], anxiety and motivation, as emotional and psychological constructs, play influential roles in SL/FL learning and acquisition and hence remain important research topics in the field. A better understanding of the two issues will thus definitely help facilitate the process of becoming bilingual/multilingual, which thus should be continuously researched in various bilingual/multilingual learners in differing contexts.
