The Effects of Multiple-Intelligence Boosting Tasks on EFL Learners’ Willingness to Communicate

In modern language teaching, it is believed that students are supposed to have enough willingness to talk in the second or foreign language in order to acquire it. And, thus, students' willingness to communicate (WTC) in the classroom context is a longed-for and anticipated behavior. Consequently, this study investigated the effects of multiple-intelligence boosting tasks on Iranian EFL learners’ WTC inside the classroom context. To this end, two intact classes, each having 15 intermediate EFL learners, were selected as a Multiple Intelligence (MI) Group and a Traditional Task (TT) Group. Before the treatment, MacIntyre’s (2001) questionnaire was administered as the pre-test, and, after the intervention (i.e., at the end of session 15), it was applied as the post-test. Besides, a semi-structured interview with a number of the participants from both groups was carried out in order to record their attitudes towards task-oriented activities and their WTC after the intervention. The results obtained through a set of paired and independent samples t-tests, revealed: (1) a significant enhancement of the learners’ WTC in speaking, reading, writing, and listening comprehension from pre- to post-test in MI group, (2) a significant improvement of the participants’ WTC in TT group, (3) better performance of the MI Group than that of the TT Group, and (4) positive attitudes of the learners towards the application of tasks and their WTC inside the classroom context.