The Relationship between Intermediate EFL Students’ Oral Reproduction and their Willingness to Communicate and Self-Efficacy

Oral production plays a significant part in any academic field, especially in TEFL (Heyde,1979). This study aimed to illuminate and investigate the two psychological and crucial factors influencing the oral production: Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and Self-efficacy (SE). An attempt was made to assess the relationship among WTC, Self-Efficacy, and Oral reproduction. In so doing, after homogenizing the students as Intermediate ones via a placement test, two questionnaires of WTC (McCroskey, 1987, 1992) and Selfefficacy SE (Owen & Froman, 1988) were administered to 48 intermediate students. Having administered the questionnaires, the researcher asked the subjects to reproduce very short stories from the book entitled “Steps to Understanding”. Based on the questionnaires, the subjects were divided into four groups: 1) High WTC, High SE, 2) High WTC, Low SE, 3) Low WTC, High SE, and 4) Low WTC, Low SE. The data collected from the questionnaires as well as the scores given to their oral reproductions were analyzed through SPSS (21.00). Results indicated that there were statistically significant differences between the two groups of High WTC, High SE and Low WTC, Low SE. The former group outperformed the latter one. The outcomes of this study can have benefits for both foreign language teachers and learners. They both can attain better results by focusing more on these two psychological factors in their roles. The findings of the present study demonstrated that more concentration ought to be placed on these two psychological factors in order to enhance students’ oral reproductions. Introduction Two psychological constructs gaining recognition in the last decade are self-efficacy (SE) and Willingness to Communicate (WTC). Initially introduced by MacIntyre, Clement, Dornyei, and Noels (1998) for language studies, WTC can function as both an individual difference variable in learning L2 in addition to its being a goal for L2 instruction. Alemi (2012) asserts that both WTC and self-efficacy have been less researched in the Iranian EFL context when compared with other individual differences factors such as motivation, aptitude, and learning strategy. This gap in the literature is more evident when it comes to the potential effect WTC and self-efficacy on oral reproduction in L2 acquisition. In other words, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between these two psychological variables (WTC and self-efficacy) and oral reproduction among Iranian English learners. A new concept in the psychology of language is termed as Willingness to Communicate (WTC) that emerges from the importance of interaction in language learning (Mackey & Gass, 2006; Swain, 2005). WTC is manifested in several models, of which the two most important are McCroskey’s (1997) Willingness-To-Communicate Model and Clement, Baker, MacIntyre Willingness-ToCommunicate Model (2003). Willingness to communicate (WTC) has been used to illustrate a person's degree of inclination to participate in discourse in a second or foreign language (MacIntyre, Clement, Dornyei & Noels, 1998). Some researchers have discussed that a rudimentary aim of second language education should be the creation of WTC in the language