Korean University Students’ Willingness to Communicate

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how Korean university students are willing to communicate in English and how their willingness to communicate (WTC) in English is correlated with individual difference factors such as self-perceived communication competence (PC), communication apprehension (CA), their self-evaluated English proficiency, and their personality. The participants were 124 Korean university students who were studying English as a foreign language in Korea. They responded to the questionnaires concerning their perceptions of WTC and the individual difference factors. Descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, ANOVA, and multiple regression were used for this study. The findings indicated that: (a) students tended to perceive themselves to have intermediate English proficiency, to be more or less extroverted, and to have moderate WTC, PC, and CA; (b) overall, there were no significant gender differences in WTC and the individual difference factors; (c) WTC was significantly positively correlated with proficiency, personality, and PC, while WTC was significantly negatively correlated with CA; (d) PC was the strongest predictor of WTC. (Geumgang University)