This month we published Willingness to Communicate in Instructed Second Language Acquisition by Anna Mystkowska-Wiertelak and Mirosław Pawlak. In this post the authors tell us what inspired them to write the book and explain the process involved in their research.
The main inspiration for writing the book was the conviction that learners’ willingness to speak in the foreign language classroom has to be investigated from both a macro- and micro-perspective. The first task was relatively easy because a number of tools were available. While there were hurdles in obtaining the right amount of data, all it took was to put together the requisite scales, introduce the modifications we deemed necessary, and apply required statistical procedures. The second task was much more challenging because it is not easy to register changes in readiness to communicate in real time.
It was clear to us from the very outset that we wanted to focus on changes in students’ willingness to communicate as they occur in regularly scheduled classes and to identify factors responsible for such changes. Such an approach was intended to capture classroom reality and make the findings relevant to everyday concerns of practitioners. It meant that we could not rely on sophisticated software that allows tapping into changes in willingness to speak on a second-by-second basis in the performance of specific tasks because this would have entailed pulling individual students out of intact groups.
Thus we decided to use a grid on which participants indicated their willingness to speak on a scale from -10 (total unwillingness) to +10 (total willingness) at five-minute intervals. The data from these grids, augmented by information gleaned from detailed lesson plans and questionnaires the students filled out at the end of each class, helped us establish changes in readiness to speak at both the class and individual levels and to establish reasons for these fluctuations.
Although this procedure is not free from shortcomings, one of which is some degree of intrusiveness in the tasks performed, it is difficult to think of a better way to tap the dynamic nature of readiness to speak. There is also a possibility of getting a much finer-grained view of such changes if students indicate their willingness to speak at shorter time-intervals (e.g., every 10 seconds). Clearly, there is a need to further refine this procedure but it is difficult to offer alternatives for the investigation of the dynamic nature of willingness to communicate in the classroom.
For more information about this book, please visit our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like Willingness to Communicate in the Chinese EFL University Classroom by Jian-E Peng.