Dynamicity of Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and Actual Speaking Production in Doing Tasks Regarding Task Planning and Task Topic Locality

This paper seeks to find out how task planning, task type locality and learners’ WTC have effects on learners’ actual speech production. To do so, 60 language learners from Iran Language Institute in Gorgan were selected as the participants who were all males aged from 14 to 24. They were divided into two groups randomly and were given WTC questionnaire (MacIntyre et al, 2001) to measure their willingness to communicate. The first group was taught planned tasks with localized topics while in the second group the tasks were unplanned with international topics. All interactions in tasks were recorded so that participants’ actual speaking production could be measured by counting the number of words and turn-takings they produced. Two-way ANOVA was used as the statistic procedure to find out the answer of the research questions. According to the results, two findings were obtained. First learners with low WTC have better actual speaking production in tasks with localized topics than tasks with international topics while this difference was not observed among learners with high WTC. Second, learners with low WTC have better actual speaking production in planned tasks than unplanned tasks while this difference was not observed among learners with high WTC.