An investigation of university students' willingness to communicate in English in relation to some learner variables

Over the last two decades, scientific studies on willingness to communicate have been carried out in many countries such as America, Canada, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, China, Iran and Turkey. Despite many studies on willingness to communicate in the world and our country, university students’ willingness to communicate has not been studied by researchers. With this in mind, this study aimed to examine the randomly selected 328 students’ willingness to communicate at a state university in the Western part of our country in relation to some student variables. In the present study, the willingness to communicate scale developed by McCroskey (1992) was used as a data collection instrument. The first part of the scale contained personal information such as age, gender, major, and having direct contact with English-speaking people at the university. In the second part of the scale, there were 20 items measuring students' willingness to communicate in English. However, eight filler items were not analyzed. The results of the study showed that students had moderate WTC in English. While it was found in the study that learner variables such as major and having direct contact with English speaking people had effect on university students’ willingness to communicate in English, learner variables such as age and gender were not found to have effect on their WTC in English