An Investigation into Non-English Majored Students’ Willingness to Communicate in English

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Tham Van Nguyen, Truc Thi Nguyen, Tran Huynh Nguyen, Khoa Trong Tran , Quan MinhTrinh

Abstract

Willingness to communicate (WTC) has recently been considered an important part of the foreign language learning process and communication plays an important role in developing EFL learners’ communicative competence. In many parts of the world, people as well as university students can use English for most of their daily communication. Recent times have seen a shift in empirical investigations of language learners' communicative readiness whilst research related to WTC has been conducted in a variety of contexts and populations. Although WTC is not a new term, it is worth researching new aspects of this field in which this study is an attempt to explore non-English majored students’ WTC and its influential factors. Following a mixed research method, the current study gained the quantitative data through questionnaires administered to 300 non-English majored students at
FPT University while its qualitative data were achieved from semi-structured interviews with 30 randomly-chosen participants completing the questionnaires. The results indicate that the non-English majored students’ WTC is shown at different extents. Students are only willing to communicate at a basic level and with familiar topics. Interestingly, despite studying in a fully English environment, students’ self-confidence and motivation are still the two most influential factors to their WTC. In addition, the findings also reveal that other surveyed factors have a direct influence on the students' WTC. From the findings, suggestions and pedagogical implications were made for students, teachers and universities to help them have better insights into students’ WTC.

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