Understanding Kazakhstani Students’ Willingness to Communicate in English in Senior Secondary STEM Subjects

Abstract

Reticence among Asian EFL/ESL learners was a concern for many researchers even before Willingness to Communicate (WTC) was introduced as a construct in Second Language Acquisition. Later, empirical studies on WTC in the second language (L2) in Asian EFL contexts have been progressively conducted, particularly in Japan (Yashima, 2002, 2018) and China (Peng and Woodrow, 2010). Yet a great deal more research on WTC remains to be done. The present study differs from prior studies by examining a group of senior secondary school students’ WTC in English in STEM (i.e. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan pursues a trilingual educational policy that indicates a percentage of citizens who speak Kazakh as the national language, Russian as the language of interethnic communication, and English as the language of successful integration in the global economy. Hence, English as a third language (L3) is used as a medium of instruction in STEM subjects in secondary schools. The present study adopted a mixed-methods approach to uncover the level of participants’ L3 WTC and the factors that either boost or deter their oral interaction in English in STEM classes. The data were collected from a close-ended questionnaire completed by 170 students, followed by a semi-structured interview with 10 students. The findings indicated that the students’ level of L3 WTC in STEM subjects was below average. Guided by Dörnyei’s (2009) language motivational self-system, the qualitative data exploring the factors underlying students’ L3 WTC in STEM subjects reported the influences of students’ future-oriented self-guides in L3 (Ideal L3 self, Ought-to L3 self) and their L3 learning experience as being dependent on their self-confidence in L3.This study concludes by stressing the importance of enhancing teachers and policy makers’ awareness in multilingual societies (particularly in Kazakhstan) to different situational factors that may affect STEM students’ WTC in English, and strategies that can be adopted in this regard.