THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG WILLINGNESS TO COMMUNICATE, LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY, AND ORAL FLUENCY OF IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS
REZA BIRIA
Department of English Language, Khorasgan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Khorasgan, Iran
BAHAREH JOUYBAR *
Department of English Language, Khorasgan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Khorasgan, Iran
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Willingness to communicate is the extent to which learners are prepared to initiate communication when they have a choice. It constitutes a factor believed to lead to individual differences in language learning. Those who have high WTC are expected to express themselves more freely. The present study aimed at investigating the relationship among willingness to communicate, language proficiency, and oral fluency of Iranian EFL learners. Participants were 60 (42 females, 18 males) Iranian EFL learners from Shokouhe-Enghelab English language institute in Tehran with the age range of 18 to 27 years old. Participants were requested to fill out the willingness to communicate questionnaire by Macintyre [1]. Then, they were given some topics to talk about such as hometown and family. The oral proficiency of the participants was marked by two raters in order to maximize the raters’ reliability. The result of the analysis, using the Spearman Rank-order correlation, showed that there was a statistically meaningful relationship among willingness to communicate, language proficiency, and oral proficiency of the learners, meaning those who had higher willingness to communicate could express themselves more fluently. Students, teachers, and researchers in TEFL can avail from the results of the study.
Keywords: Oral fluency, willingness to communicate, language proficiency