Level of Willingness to Communicate (WTCCR Classroom context) and Willingness to Communicate (WTCRL Real life context) in ESL among Pakistani ESL Learners at BS Level: A Comparative Study
Keywords:
Willingness to Communicate (WTC), WTCCR (Classroom context), WTCRL (Real life context), ESLAbstract
The people of Pakistan want to communicate in English in their daily life. There are 73 local languages spoken in Pakistan, English is one of them (Lewis, Simons & Fennig, 2009). The language used in British rule and till today while educating children of the elite class is English while Urdu is the language of education for the common masses. The issue which ESL learners of Pakistan have to tackle is their difficulty in speaking English despite the fact that English speaking is not emphasized at school and there is also no focus on Willingness to Communicate (WTC) which means “the intention and desire to initiate communication” (MacIntyre et al., 1998). In this research, an attempt has been made to find out the level of WTCCR and WTCRL. The study was conducted with the students studying under the Masters and BS programs of the universities of Pakistan. About 1140 students participated in the study coming from 10 different universities of Pakistan. This research study was quantitative and descriptive. It was non-experimental research and therefore, survey method has been used for conducting this research. Data collection instruments used for purpose of the data collection were the self-reported survey questionnaires. SPSS-20 software was used for the data analysis. Simple percentages and Chi-square were used as a statistical instrument to analyze the data collected. The willingness to communication of both types WTCCR and WTCRL were found to be in the category of 'Often Willing to Communicate'. The analysis performed using Chi-Square test, however, demonstrates that the difference of the levels of WTCCR and WTCRL is highly significant. Based on the results of the study, recommendations were suggested.
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