Effect of Oral Communication Strategies (OCSs) on Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in Classroom Context and Real-life Context
Keywords:
Oral Communication Strategies (OCSs), Willingness to Communicate (Classroom Context) WTCCR, Willingness to Communicate (Real Life Context) WTCRL, ESLAbstract
Sine the birth of Pakistan, learning and teaching of English has faced significant hurdles. ESL teaching and learning in Pakistan have failed especially in equipping our ESL students to speak ESL. Most of the research studies conducted on the topic hold that ESL learners in Pakistan lack oral communication skills even after they have been taught English as a compulsory subject up to the intermediate and graduation levels (Coleman, 2010; Ghani, 2003). The oral communication strategies OCSs are said to be “verbal and non-verbal approaches that are used when there is a failure in the process of communication resulting from ability factors or lack of competency” (Canale & Swain, 1980). The Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in ESL is considered to be the intention to initiate communication with other people (MacIntyre et al., 1998). This study aims at exploring the effect of oral communication strategies (OCSs) on willingness to communicate in classroom context (WTCCR) and willingness to communicate in real life context (WTCRL) of the ESL students. The participants of the current study are the Pakistani ESL learners, who study at the Masters and BS level. 1140 ESL learners took part in the study from 10 different Pakistani universities. This is a quantitative and correlational study. The current study falls under non-experimental type and survey method was employed in this study to gather required information. The SPSS-20 was used in the analysis of data. To find out the influence of OCSs on the WTCCR and WTCRL of the ESL students, some statistical tools were applied, including crosstab with simple percentage, Chi-square test, Pearson Correlation coefficient, ANOVA and regression analysis. The study findings indicate that there is very strong positive effect of overall usage of oral communication strategies on WTCCR and positively significant effect on WTCRL of the learners.
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