iranian english learners’ perception and personality: a dual approach to investigating influential factors on willingness to communicate

abstract previous studies on willingness to communicate (wtc) have shown the influence of many individual or situational factors on students’ tendency to engage in classroom communication, in which wtc has been viewed either at the trait-level or situational level. however, due to the complexity of the notion of willingness to communicate, the present study suggests that these two strands are inseparable and should be investigated holistically in order to get more meaningful and comprehensive influential factors on wtc. to this aim, learners’ big five personality traits and their trait-like wtc was investigated through administering questionnaires, then pearson-product moment formula and structrual equation modeling (sem) were employed respectively to see whether there is any correlation between their personality traits and their willingness to communicate in the second language (l2 wtc) and to check which personality trait among students could predict their wtc the most. furthermore, observations and semi-structured interviews were done to probe students’ perceptions and opinions about the favorable personality traits of professors which could influence their wtc as a situational factor. the results revealed that, students’ personality was significantly related to their l2 wtc and openness to experience was the best predictor of students’ willingness to communicate. then, the transcribed interviews were imported to nvivo 8 program for encoding the documents and uncovering subtle trends and patterns through sophisticated query tools, and then a comprehensive model was designed to illustrate the situational influential factors on students wtc. professors’ personality along with some other factors were found to be quite influential on students’ wtc, and the factors underlying the professors’ openness to experience were most frequently stated by the students as influential factors on their willingness to communicate in the second language.