Willingness to Communicate (WTC)
The term ” unwillingness to communicate” was firstly given by Burgoon (1976), to describe the condition in which an individual obviates oral communication in the L1 due to several factors like alienation, lack of communication competence, introversion, anomie, and communication apprehension. The term “shyness” was used by McCroskey and Richmond (1982) to inspect readiness, they defined it as a tendency to be diffident, reserved and to talk less. McCroskey and Bear (1985), later, offered the term “willingness to communicate” which is more accurate and defined it as the intention to start a conversation when given the opportunity. WTC was defined then by MacIntyre et al. (1998) as the person’s readiness to get engaged in a conversation with a specific person or group of people using the L2 at a particular time. MacIntyre et al., (1998) designed conceptual pyramid in their adaptation of WTC to the L2 context to account for individual differences in the decision for establishing communication in L2. The heuristic model shows the range of components potentially influencing WTC in the L2,
Which has served as a starting point for the choice of factors to be investigated by this very research paper (Figure 1 below):
Figure 1: The heuristic model of variables influencing WTC (MacIntyre et al., 1998, p. 547)
Empirical Research on WTC Construct
For recent decades, WTC construct has been an interesting issue of research among the specialists from various fields including the Linguistics, Psychology, and Sociology among other fields. Diverse specialists have utilized distinctive approaches to investigate the WTC model. Utilizing surveys, interviews, and other such activities, scientists have figured out why some students look for, while others stay away from L2 interaction.
In the EFL setting, there have been exact investigations, which tried MacIntyre et al’s. (1998) WTC model. For instance, in the Korean EFL setting, Kang (2005) pointed out that students felt comfortable when conversing with someone whom they knew about. Kim (2004) completed an investigation to look at the unwavering quality of MacIntyre et al’s.
(1998) demonstrate in clarifying WTC among Korean learners and its implementation in the
Korean EFL setting. As indicated by Kim (2004), Korean learners’ WTC in L2 was immediately influenced by their apparent self- confidence and in an indirect way affected by inspiration through self-assurance. Further, in the Turkish EFL setting, Cetinkaya (2005) explored the interrelations among learners’ WTC in L2, inspiration, correspondence uneasiness, apparent correspondence capability, outlook toward the universal network, and personality. Like Kim’s (2004) research, Turkish learners’ WTC was observed to be immediately influenced by their apparent fearlessness and in an indirect way affected by their inspiration through self-assurance.
In the Saudi setting, not very many investigations have been directed with respect to WTC. Alqahtani (2015) inspected factors affecting WTC among Saudi male learners towards learning English. His investigation uncovered a few factors, for example, inspiration level, social and cultural factors that influence learners’ ability to learn and speak in English. In the university level, Mahdi (2014) conducted a study on university students and found that personality traits and interlocutor types have a great effect on WTC.
It very well may be found in the broad research done on ability to convey that there is a scope of various variables that impact EFL students. Recent reports that have been led in the EFL setting are Simić (2014) and (Syed and Kuzborska, 2018). In their study on postgraduate students’ WTC, Syed and Kuzborska (2018) classified factors influencing learners’ WTC in the classroom into three main dimensions: psychological, contextual, and linguistic. Simić (2014) researched the students’ WTC factors utilizing the most widely recognized and legitimate instruments in the field of WTC proposed by Barraclough et al. (1988), MacIntyre et al. (1998), and Gutmann (2012). Simić (2014) discovered that the most widely recognized factors that have impact on the EFL learners are “preparedness, topic, speaking self-confidence, speaker’s personality, relationship with the interlocutor, perceived speaking skills of the speaker, task type, correction and grading, class atmosphere and embarrassment” (p.21). The current study will draw on the factors found in (Simić, 2014) and the three classifications in (Syed and Kuzborska, 2018), as it will be shown in table 2 in the next chapter, in an organized manner to draw more understanding on the influencing factors.
Sample Solution
