The Willingness of Preparatory Year Students to Communicate in English

Abstract

Willing to communicate (WTC) has been the focus of researchers in the field of second language acquisition SLA. Therefore, this study focuses on the learners’ WTC in the Saudi context. The participants were 23 female preparatory year students who studied English courses at King Abdul-Aziz University. The study’s instrument is a questionnaire adopted by Mahmoodi and Moazam (2014) to measure the WTC of Iranian learners and modified it to be suitable for Saudi learners. The findings indicated that the participants are WTC in English inside the classrooms; however, they are more willing to communicate outside the classrooms. The findings also showed a significant positive correlation between WTC inside and outside EFL classrooms. Finally, the study’s findings encourage the teachers and instructors to involve the learners in more interesting communicative activities that increase their WTC inside the classrooms.