COMMUNICATION APPREHENSION AND INTERCULTURAL WILLINGNESS TO COMMUNICATE AMONG UNDERGRADUATES IN MALAYSIAN PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES

Willingness to interact with people from different cultures is the most fundamental factor for successful and effective intercultural communication, and also crucial in the simulation of desire for interaction in such context. However, high-level communication apprehension reduces the level of intercultural willingness to communicate, which eventually affects intercultural communication and vice versa. Meanwhile, some scholars argued that a moderate level of communication apprehension will increase intercultural willingness to communicate. Hence, this study started with the investigation of the level of both communication apprehension and intercultural willingness to communicate and ended with the investigation on the relationship between communication apprehension and intercultural willingness to communicate among multicultural undergraduates from five public universities in Malaysia. A total of 450 respondents were recruited to participate in this study. Neuliep and McCroskey’s Intercultural Communication Apprehension scale and Kassing’s Intercultural Willingness to Communicate scale were adopted and modified to assess respondents’ communication apprehension and intercultural willingness to communicate, respectively. Data were coded, entered, and analysed using the IBM SPSS Statistics version 22. Our findings show that all respondents were having a moderate level of communication apprehension which eventually triggered a high level of intercultural willingness to communicate among these respondents. Pearson’s correlation analysis revealed a significant positive correlation between the moderate level of communication apprehension and intercultural willingness to communicate, just like the results documented in the review of the literature. The implications of the findings are discussed at the end of this paper.