Korean Learners' Willingness to Communicate in English in EFL and ESL Contexts

The purposes of the study are (a) to examine, using chiefly the framework of MacIntyre et al. 's (1998) model of willingness to communicate (WTC), whether there are differences between Korean ESL and EFL university-level students in communication-related variables; and (b) to observe the effects of the two learner groups' prior affective experience of the L2 on their WTC. Two research instruments are quantitative (analyzed through SPSS program) and qualitative data (one open-ended question and interviews). As for the first research objective, the study indicates that there are significant differences between the Korean EFL and ESL groups in terms of state communicative self-competence and L2 self-confidence, while there are no significant differences in terms of international posture and intergroup attitude. Regarding the second research objective, the negative relationship between language anxiety and perceived competence is more concretely seen in the findings of the open-ended question in which learners, EFL and ESL group alike, more responded to the negative experience than the positive one, which suggests that learners' earlier intensive experience with an L2 is a strong predictor of WTC in the L2. From these findings, I suggested the necessity of affective transformation for cultivating appropriate emotions constitutive of L2 learning.