THE COMPARISON OF WILLINGNESS TO COMMUNICATE AND THE PREFERRED CONTEXTS BETWEEN THE M.A STUDENTS OF KERMAN AZAD UNIVERSITY AND KERMAN INSTITUTE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Willingness to Communicate (WTC) is the most basic tendency toward communication. Almost everyone may easily respond to a direct question, but many would not let an interaction go on, or initiate one. This paper investigated WTC in English among twenty six MA students at two different universities and the contexts in which they show more preference to communicate. The research made a comparison between the students of two universities to explore whether the common understanding of the state university (or the non-state ones supervised by the ministry of Higher Education more than Azad) students being better than those of Azad universities, regarding WTC, is correct or not. In order to accomplish the study, two questionnaires were provided one of which measured the degree of WTC among students (containing twenty seven questions) and the other, consisting of twelve questions, explored twelve contexts in which the students would choose to communicate. The study concluded that neither in WTC, nor the preferred context was there a difference between the two groups and the results were quite similar. Consequently, regarding WTC and its preferred context, the common idea - that the students of the two universities are different - is rejected based on the results of this study.