To do or not to do: willingness to communicate in the ESL context

English is used by more than one and a half billion people as a first, second or foreign language for communication purposes (Strevens, 1992). In this context, the purpose of teaching English has shifted from mastery of the grammatical rules to the ability to use the target language for successful communication. Consequently, the communication aspect of teaching and learning English has become the key issue in the domain of second language acquisition (Yashima, 2002: 54). Therefore, the issue of whether the learners will communicate in English when they have the chance to do so and to what extent they are willing to communicate gain importance. These questions have led to the emergence of an important construct in the field of L2 instruction, i.e. willingness to communicate (hereafter, WTC), which is defined as a learner's ‘readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using a L2’ (MacIntyre et al ., 1998: 547). MacIntyre and his associates even proposed that WTC in L2 should be conceptualized as ‘the primary goal’ of language instruction (MacIntyre et al ., 1998: 545). This paper explores the important concept of WTC by looking into Pakistani students' WTC in Canada.