Investigating the Causes of Willingness To Communicate in English Classroom Among Students at SMP Negeri 3 Jember

Abstract

Communication is a skill that needs to be furnished over time. Tara and O'Hara (2008) argue that communication is neither a passive or predictable event. However, aside from the fact that most people acquired the ability to talk since they were born, not all people can communicate well unless they are committed into making special efforts to develop and refine this skill further (Ludlow & Panton, 1992). Beyond the classroom environment, there are no multilingual settings that demand students to use the English language, particularly in rural areas. Moreover, they have only little contact with the speakers of English in their environment. (Daming, 2003; Li, 1998). Thus, developing students’ willingness to communicate (WTC) is important to make students more frequent in using English within communicative activities. The extent of WTC that learners have would affect their performance in communicative activities and determine the result of their learning outcome. This research used a qualitative case study that investigated the causes of students’ WTC in English classroom environment. Through the qualitative case study, I can get thorough data that could give me a holistic understanding of students’ WTC causes. In getting the data, I used observation and interview methods. I developed the observation criteria and interview questions based on MacIntyre, et al (1998) WTC aspects in L2. I collected observation data to get the depiction of WTC aspects in students’ learning environment and choosing the 3 research participants. For the interview, I used it to get students’ WTC information from research participants’ (students) perspective and context participant’s (teacher) perspective. I chose students of a Junior High School in Jember as the school for me to get my research data. I analyzed the result from the interview and observation using content analysis that I adopted from Erlingsson & Brysiewic (2017). The procedures are analyzing the meaning units within the data texts, then turn them into condensed meaning units and,finally, those condensed meaning units would be coded then I can interpret the relevance of the finding to answer my research question. The result of this research showed that the causes of students’ WTC in classroom were divided into internal causes and external causes. For Internal causes, there are English-language confidence, self-perceived interpersonal relationship, and personality. On the other hand, the external causes are learning activities, lesson’s complexity, teacher’s classroom management, classroom facilities, peers' attitude, and lesson’s time placement. Internal causes come from the students themselves and those causes is difficult to alter as those causes are attached to students personally. However, external causes can be altered by the teacher as it comes from students’ surroundings. Thus, these two types of causes indeed have some extent of effect towards students’ willingness to communicate. The result of this research is hoped to provide meaningful contributions especially for the English teacher, and the other researchers. For English teachers, the results of this study can be applied when English teachers decided to make a more communicative learning activity because students’ WTC would be more likely to be higher as the WTC causes are taken into consideration. Moreover, for the other researchers, the result of this research can inspire other researchers to investigate the topic of willingness to communicate in different focus by employing different WTC theories or taking other research participants to gain more different result and, thus, fulfill the void of knowledge in WTC.