Measuring Communicative Intentions and Capabilities: Learners’ English Proficiency as a Supplement to Willingness to Communicate

Abstract

In this study, we attempted to measure English learners’ communicative intentions and capabilities (CIC) by adding their English proficiency to their willingness to communicate (WTC) as a predictor of the learners’ English use. In the context of communicative language teaching (CLT), learners’ WTC is considered the key to linking important learner factors such as self-perceived competence, anxiety, and motivation. Given that WTC only accounts for learners’ communicative intentions, we hypothesized that learners’ communicative capabilities (i.e., language proficiency) would be a meaningful addition to measuring overall CIC. To test this hypothesis, we collected a total of 67 samples (N = 17,811) and conducted an analysis using a metaanalytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) approach. The results indicated that the learners’ overall CIC successfully predicted their English use, with a significant path coefficient (β = .525, p = .02). Furthermore, we found that the size of the direct contributions of perceived competence and motivation became non-significantly marginal (ps > .05), indicating that adding learners’ proficiency to the WTC to measure the overall CIC can improve the overall explanatory power of the MASEM model to predict learners’ English use.