Iranian EFL Learners’ Willingness to Communicate and Language Learning Orientations

AbstractWillingness to communicate (WTC) has been defined as the intention to initiate communication, given a choice. It was speculated that orientations toward language learning would affect students’ WTC in a foreign language (FL). Being that, Urmia university students, living in a somewhat multilingual community, participated in the current study. Be that as it may, questionnaires on WTC inside and outside the classroom and the questionnaire on language learning orientations adapted from MacIntyre, et al., (2001) were put to good use for the purpose of collecting data. Hence WTC inside and outside the classroom was measured in each of four skill areas: speaking, writing, reading, and comprehension. Alternatively, five orientations or causes of studying a FL were investigated: travel, job related, friendship, personal knowledge, and school achievement. Under those circumstances, results revealed that application of all five orientations for language learning was poorly correlated with WTC both inside and outside the classroom. Moreover, job related orientation scores were weakly correlated with WTC outside the classroom contrary to expectations. Given these points, it would come to light that stronger orientations for language learning tend to be more favorably related to WTC inside than outside the classroom