‘In New Zealand I Feel More Confidence’: The Role of Context in the Willingness to Communicate (WTC) of Migrant Iranian English Language Learners

摘要

This article will discuss recent theories of Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and provide an overview ofstudies into this individual difference which have been conducted in both Iran and New Zealand (NZ). So farfew qualitative studies have been carried out into WTC or have used permanent migrants as participants. Thearticle reports on a longitudinal study of the WTC of a group of Iranian migrants to NZ. By means ofquestionnaires, observations, and individual semi-structured interviews conducted at six-month intervals, casestudies of these learners in a NZ university English class were compiled. Their WTC was found to encompasssuch learner characteristics as confidence, motivation, and personality, and varied from country to country andsemester to semester. Finally, this article discusses the contribution of this study to the WTC field of research,identifying the implications of these results for teachers of English in the ESL (English as a Secondlanguage/migrant) context and possible avenues for future research.