Emotioncy, Extraversion, and Anxiety in Willingness to Communicate in English
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran
ABSTRACT
A myriad of factors may be involved in learning a second language, one of which is individuals` Willingness to Communicate (WTC). Research has shown that, all things being equal, those who are more willing to engage in conversation with others, are more effective language learners. WTC may be in turn influenced by a variety of proximal (e.g., anxiety) and distal (e.g., extraversion) factors. Emotioncy as a newly-developed concept, which refers to the emotions evoked by the senses, is also hypothesized to affect WTC. Emotioncy ranging from Avolvement (Null) to Exvolvement (Auditory, Visual, and Kinesthetic emotioncies) and Involvement (Inner and Arch emotioncies), focuses on measuring the sense-emotion relationship quantitatively. To test the hypothesis: the higher the level of emotioncy, the higher the level of WTC, forty one advanced English language learners were asked to participate in a discussion class. Immediately after discussing a couple of topics, the learners were asked to take the emotioncy, extraversion, state anxiety, and WTC scales. The results showed that extraversion and emotioncy are positively related to WTC, while anxiety negatively influences it. Concerning emotioncy, it was found that the involved individuals are more willing to talk than the exvolved ones. In fact, when there exists an emotioncy gap for a topic in the native language of the learners, second language performance may be affected. In sum, the outcomes of the study provide empirical support for the significance of emotioncy in WTC, suggesting it as a new concept to be investigated more deeply by language educators and researchers.
KEYWORDS
Emotioncy, Avolvement, Involvement, Exvolvement, WTC, Extraversion, Anxiety, Language Learning, Emotioncy Gap, Sensory Motivation