The relationship between incommensurable emotions and willingness to communicate in English as a foreign language: a multiple case study

Abstract

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.