The relationship between incommensurable emotions and willingness to communicate in English as a foreign language: a multiple case study
By Jean–Marc Dewaele, L. Pavelescu. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 2019
160 citations recorded by the source corpus.
ABSTRACT This study aimed to investigate the link between Foreign Language Enjoyment, Foreign Language Anxiety and Willingness to Communicate in Denisa and Anda, two high school learners of English as a Foreign Language in Romania. Qualitative data were collected during a school semester including lesson observations, a written task and semi-structured interviews with the aim of obtaining retrodictive data in order to gain a better understanding of the nature and amount of fluctuation and change in participants’ Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in English over time. The approach is strongly influenced by Dynamic System Theory and is based on the concept of constructed emotions. The study revealed that WTC was related to the uniquely constructed emotions of Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) and Foreign Language (Classroom) Anxiety (FLCA) in dynamic, idiosyncratic ways, that took root during the first contact with English, extending into the present and the future. Learners’ personality and their experiences inside and outside the English classroom shaped their emotions which had direct and indirect repercussions on their WTC. The paper concludes that case studies into and WTC offer a crucial complement to quantitative studies as they highlight the fact that emotions cannot be essentialized and that their relationship with WTC can fluctuate sharply over the short term and develop over the longer term, depending on a range of interacting learner-internal and contextual variables. FLE and FLCA do remain useful concepts at a super-ordinate level.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fe54bde37b5da7fd93bd1eddc59014894932f39
How researchers see this paper
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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
- Lawrence Jun Zhang
- Lanxi Wang
- Ali Derakhshan
- Yongliang Wang
- P. Macintyre
- Jean–Marc Dewaele
- Chengchen Li
- K. Rajagopalan
In Language and Linguistics
- Lawrence Jun Zhang
- Lanxi Wang
- Ali Derakhshan
- Yongliang Wang
- P. Macintyre
- Jean–Marc Dewaele
- Chengchen Li
- Livia Dewaele
In Social Psychology
- Lawrence Jun Zhang
- Ali Derakhshan
- Yongliang Wang
- Lanxi Wang
- P. Macintyre
- Jean–Marc Dewaele
- Chengchen Li
Citations in the corpus
- Researching and Practicing Positive Psychology in Second/Foreign Language Learning and Teaching: The Past, Current Status and Future Directions (2021, background): “Resilience has been associated with different L2 educational outcomes such as learning motivation (Kim and Kim, 2021), well-being, and teaching enjoyment (Proietti Ergün and Dewaele, 2021).”
- Willingness to communicate in the L2 about meaningful photos: Application of the pyramid model of WTC (2021, background): “…motivation to talk about his wife and accompanying positive emotions both stated and those that can be inferred (e.g. pride, love) are strong enough to override the negative emotions (e.g. longing, sadness) aroused by talking about this photo (Boudreau et al., 2018; Dewaele & Pavelescu, 2021).”