Revisiting willingness to communicate in English as a foreign language: the Serbian perspective

Abstract

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The paper investigates the concept of willingness to communicate (WTC) in the context of tertiary education in Serbia with a twofold aim: (a) to assess the level of students’ WTC, both generally and in relation to each of the four language skills, both inside the classroom and outside of it; (b) to explore the extent to which orientation towards learning L2 and self-perceived competence affect the students’ WTC. To this end, we conducted a survey with 171 B1–B2 level students at the University of Novi Sad. The measuring instrument was a three-part questionnaire, used to gather background information on the participants and their self-perceived English language competence based on a 3-point self-assessment Likert scale, as well as a list of 20 statements to examine the students’ orientation towards learning English in relation to five types of orientation. The results of the analysis, performed using the SPSS Statistics 20 software package (paired-samples t-tests, bivariate correlations and a multiple linear regression), confirm the importance of the affective dimension in learning and point to the predominance of self-perceived competence as a crucial factor for L2 WTC.