Critical thinking and willingness to communicate among efl students

Abstract

The purpose of the study has been to determine the existence of any significant relationship between willingness to communicate as a determining factor in language learning and critical thinking and its psychological constructs. The five psychological levels of critical thinking are inference ability, recognizing assumption ability, deduction ability, interpretation ability and argument evaluation ability. There were two instruments implemented so as to obtain as valid data as possible. First, Willingness to Communicate Questionnaire (WTCQ) was adapted from MacIntyre, Baker, Clément and Conrod (2001) to measure students’ willingness to communicate. The second instrument was Critical Thinking Questionnaire (CTQ) which was adapted from Watson & Glaser (1994), and it was intended to gauge critical thinking and the related psychological constructs. The sample of the study included 360 BA English students who were selected based on the multistage random sampling from the English students at Islamic Azad University branches of Tehran province. The research has been conducted based on a descriptive correlational study which resulted in the existence of significant positive correlation between all psychological levels of critical thinking and willingness to communicate. Moreover, critical thinking as a major variable was also found significantly correlated with willingness to communicate.