Enhancing Willingness to Communicate: Relative Effects of Visualization and Goal Setting

Abstract

This article examines the relative effects of two treatments—goal setting and visualization—on enhancing Willingness to Communicate (WTC) among a group of 373 Japanese university EFL learners. Although longitudinal studies in both EFL and ESL settings have been conducted to examine the developmental aspect of WTC, no solid results of enhancing WTC through instruction have been found in EFL settings. Based on Dörnyei's (2005) concept of the Ideal L2 Self, lessons were designed for the two treatment groups so learners could visualize themselves as future specialists in their field, discussing global issues and presenting their creative ideas for solving these global problems. For the second treatment group, a goal setting activity was introduced in which students articulated their speaking goals in each class. The nontreatment group, the visualization group, and the visualization plus goal setting group had approximately the same amount of communicative activities. The ANCOVA results suggest that the visualization treatment alone was not effective in enhancing learners' L2 WTC over the nontreatment group. However, when visualization was combined with goal setting, the increase in learners' L2 WTC was significantly larger compared to the visualization group, and by implication, significantly larger compared to the nontreatment group. Additionally, the impact of visualization and goal setting on learners' WTC was qualitatively explored.