Despite the famous assertion of Krashen (1985: 2) that '[s]peaking is a result of acquisition and not its cause', few theoreticians, researchers or practitioners would probably take issue with the claim that interaction is key to learning and using a second or foreign language, both in the classroom and outside. When it comes to the former, it is difficult to imagine that teachers could just patiently wait until learners decide to engage in target language (TL) production, not least because, first, some of them might for various reasons never do and, second, if instruction is limited to several hours a week, such an approach would be tantamount to wasting precious, and at the same time scarce, learning opportunities. As regards the latter, although it is certainly possible to envisage situations in which individuals are at liberty to wait months until they feel confident enough to try to utter their first words in the TL, for most people, whether they are professionals, exchange students or merely tourists, the ability to accomplish their communicative goals, however basic these initially might be, is of vital importance from the very beginning as they find themselves in a foreign language environment. This is because they might wish to exchange ideas about projects they are working on, ask their teacher for an extension for a homework assignment or simply complain about the lack of clean towels in their hotel rooms or ask for directions to the train station. It is this realisation that provided the rationale for research into willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second language (L2), an immediate antecedent to the actual act of communication, since empirical investigations of this kind are conducted with a view to pinpointing the factors that underpin such communicative intent in the hope that this will shed light on steps that can be taken in the classroom to encourage learners to speak.