Influences of willingness to communicate and foreign language enjoyment on second language learners’ motivation
Influences of willingness to communicate and foreign language enjoyment on second language learners’ motivation

Summary/Abstract: Willingness to Communicate (WTC) and Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) motivate university students who learn a second language (L2). Previous research suggests that WTC drives students to use an L2 with a specific group of people (MacIntyre, Clément, Dörnyei, & Noels, 1998) while FLE motivates students to carry on their L2 learning process (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014). This study focuses on the influence of WTC and FLE on university beginner students of French, German, Italian, and Spanish in Australia. Responses to five five-point Likert scale items and four open-ended questions of a questionnaire and interview narratives are analyzed to understand if and to what extent WTC and FLE shape students’ decisions to: (a) start to learn an L2 (b) continue learning an L2, and (c) discontinue learning an L2 drawing on Dörnyei and Ottó’s (1998) process-oriented approach. Results show that not only psychological reactions to the learning process are involved in students’ motivation, but also contextual elements shape L2 learning dynamics and WTC (Yashima, 2002). The Australian multicultural but, at the same time, monolingual environment shared by English-speaking countries (Ushioda, 2017) plays an important role in increasing and/or hampering students’ desire to communicate in the studied L2. Lack of communicative opportunities may be detrimental to students’ enjoyment within and outside of the formal learning environment at Australian universities.

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