The Relationship between Willingness to Communicate

The present study aimed at investigating the relationship between Iranian EFL learners¿ willingness to communicate (WTC) and their speaking fluency, accuracy, and complexity. The WTC of 57 learners (22 males and 35 females) in the intermediate level taken from Goldis English Language Institute, in Tabriz, was obtained through McCroskey¿s (1992) Willingness to Communicate Scale. Then, the participants performed an oral picture description task which was scored in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexity by the raters. Afterwards, three Pearson¿s correlation analyses were conducted to measure the degree of the relationship between WTC and the participants¿ speaking fluency, accuracy, and complexity. The results of the correlation analyses indicated that there was a statistically significant positive correlation between the participants¿ WTC and their speaking fluency, accuracy, and complexity. The results of the study could help textbook designers, curriculum planners, foreign language institutes, teachers, learners and their parents to focus on WTC and improve the communication ability of the EFL learners.