A Comparison between Male and Female in Their Willingness to Communicate and Use of Socio-Cognitive Strategies

Willingness to communicate illustrates anyone’s tendency and wish to commence a communication. Besides, socio-cognitive strategies are used when people want to interact with others and face some difficulties. The aim of this study was twofold. The first aim was to investigate the difference in willingness to communicate between Iranian male and female. The second aim was to distinguish the frequency of socio-cognitive strategies used by Iranian advance students based on their gender. To these ends, 32 advance learners (16 males and 16 females) were given the willingness to communicate questionnaire developed by MacIntyre et al. (2001) and the Socio-cognitive strategy use questionnaire. The range of the participants’ age was 17-23 in both males and females. To analyze the result of the socio-cognitive strategies use, frequencies were counted. The result showed that although there were some similarities and differences between males and females while using socio-cognitive strategies, the differences were more in social strategies than cognitive ones. After collecting the data from the questionnaires and calculating the means of the two groups, an independent sample T-test was run to compute the significant differences between the two groups. The result of the willingness to communicate questionnaire revealed that males had more tendency in communication than females. Also, the result of the socio-cognitive strategy questionnaire showed that both groups are similar in cognitive strategy use, but they are different in social strategy use.

کلیدواژه ها:

Willingness to communicate ، Socio-cognitive strategies ، EFL learners ، Communication Apprehension ، Oxford’s strategy classification system ، Triadic Reciprocal Determinism