Measuring Willingness to Communicate in English among Malaysian Language Learners through Domains of Language Use

Abstract

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and language teaching, willingness to communicate (WTC), a construct of oral communication, has been extensively researched as it is considered a facilitative factor for language development. Most studies examine this construct using the quantitative method. There are fewer studies that have examined how languages are codeswitched and used interchangeably across different social domains, a common practice among Malaysian English language users. The purpose of this research was to develop and validate a WTC measuring tool for Malaysian English language learners. In the questionnaire, WTC in English was examined and determined via four language use domains—education, friendship, transaction and family. The validity of the four domain factors was tested using the two-stage approach factor analysis. The results suggest that WTC can be seen as a domain-based construct where learner social domains are contextualized. This paper aims to briefly introduce the study and presents its validation results.

Keywords

• willingness to communicate
• domains of language use
• SLA