The concept of motivation and willingness to communicate is by many researchers considered to be essential in learning a foreign language. The purpose of the study was to investigate the concept of willingness to communicate and motivation of English language learners in the context of Slovak university students aged 18-22 learning English as a foreign language. The theoretical framework is based on the theories by Dörney [4], Gardner [1,5,6], McGroskey [7], Arnold [2], and Horwitz [18]. The manuscript is divided into two main parts, the theoretical and the empirical. The first part of the research study discusses the concepts of integrative motivation and foreign language willingness to communicate. The second presents the results of the research. The results indicated the degree of factor of foreign language and the factor of willingness to communicate (FL-WTC) of the respondents being moderately high, as the students achieved 67.57% on the scale of WTC-FL. The current research study aimed to clarify the interrelatedness of the selected affective factors and their correlation to foreign language willingness to communicate. The findings supported the motivational construct outlined in the Socio-educational model of second language acquisition of Gardner [1] suggesting that students’ motivation, namely desire, effort and attitude towards learning a language is supported by the two attitudinal components: integrativeness and attitude towards the learning situation. Although the strongest correlation occurred between the component of integrativeness and motivation the attitude towards the learning situation also significantly contributed to integrative motivation. Even though attention was paid to the importance of integrative motivation of English language learners, it also stands in a close relationship with the concept of foreign language WTC.

willingness to communicate, motivation, English language learner, educational setting