Figure 2. Communicative Activity in the English Corner Captured by Jenny

Everyone was high, especially when they were dancing, it was more like a part of my life, I mean at the beginning I went there with a purpose to practice and improve my speaking, but after this period, we got familiar with each other, the teacher and peers, they are nice, so it is more like friends getting together and having fun together, I think if I have time, I would go there every week. (PBI, 20 April 2012)

Establishing a positive social climate has been seen as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, positive teacher-student relationships are known to contribute to more engaging language learning experiences (e.g., Henry & Thorsen, 2018) but, on the other, the social cohesiveness of the group that results from it may jeopardise the group’s pursuit of academic goals (Dörnyei & Murphey, 2003). Jenny’s reflection may signal the threat of the latter, but a closer examination of her full dataset shows that the growing social bond with her fellow English Corner participants marks a significant transition in her investment in L2 learning with far reaching consequences for her WTC and for her future as an L2 user/communicator. The following two examples from Jenny’s data illustrate this point.

​

In the first, Jenny describes her lunch with the English Corner participants, whom she has now begun to see “like friends”. The communication episode that left an imprint on her memory concerned translating a restaurant menu and explaining ingredients for each course to two international teachers. This is how she recounted the event:

Although I found it was a little bit difficult, it didn’t affect my mood to enjoy the conversation, it was interesting and more like daily conversation between people, like friends get together, then eating and chatting. I remember one thing was funny that I was trying to explain the sow thistle cold and dressed with sauce, but I didn’t know how to say sow thistle in English, so I used the word ‘bitter’ instead…the two teachers were so confused about what I said, so one boy tried to explain by saying that if you have a bad mood, you need to eat this, it tastes bitter, the important thing is that everyone could engage in our conversation and we really had fun. I also learned how to use the word ‘acid’, as when I explained the boiled fish with pickled cabbage and chili, I used the word ‘acid’, then our teacher pointed out that acid should be used in industry not in food. … I mean although I made some mistakes, and my friends as well, we didn’t worry too much about it, you would not feel you lost your face, while sometimes you felt you brought happiness to others. (PBI, 12 June 2012)

Even in the absence of data of the actual interactions that Jenny is referring to in her photo-based interviews, her desire to make meanings with others and her engagement with the new language is clearly visible in her meta-linguistic reflections on her lived experiences. The transcript shows Jenny’s newfound willingness to take risks with language, to negotiate meaning and to overcome difficulties and anxieties in the service of meaningful communication. And even if we do not see any of this in situ, we do witness, here and across her outside-of-the-classroom data, clear evidence of Jenny’s active here-and-now engagement with the newly encountered language. Whether this engagement is viewed across SLA paradigms as language use (Kasper, 2004), languaging (Swain et al., 2011), or linguistic uptake (Gass & Mackey, 2006), Jenny’s English Corner data show numerous examples of such active and concrete language learning practice in the context of her desire to make meaning with others. A complete lack of such detail from her Class A data clearly points to significant differences in the quality of Jenny’s language learning and use across these two situations, suggesting a crucial connection between WTC, conceptualized as persons’ emerging capacity to make meaning with others, and language learning.

Interestingly, Jenny makes every effort to channel her emerging desire to make meaning with others into contexts with similar instructional objectives to her Class A, such as IELTS preparation or English language competition. In the final example, Jenny talks about an English speech competition organized by her department, which she joined because it was “a valuable opportunity to practise L2 speaking”. Her original intention was to practise for the IELTS test. However, rather than choosing a straightforward topic that would guarantee her success, Jenny opted for a risky subject: a new buzzword on the internet, “loser” (屌丝/diao si), in order to challenge people’s conceptions of this word, typically taken by others in her wider social circle to mean something controversial, rough and generally negative and inappropriate. As she explained, “I wanted to challenge, I wanted to tell others, there will be different understandings of this word, not only how they interpreted it, but there are more positive interpretations attached to it” (PBI, 4 June 2012).

​

In sharp contrast with her participation in Class A, Jenny’s engagement with language in this setting is eminently not from the position of someone willing to conform to the rules of play, even though doing so is inherently tied to the organizational structure of this setting. Instead, her willingness—desire and passion even—to share in the meaning making with others means that she is once again, but now even more resolutely and deliberately, willing to transgresses the rules of play and face potential social and academic repercussions of disrupting the established social order of institutional interaction.

​

In fact, many judges approached the speaking contest in the same way as the teacher in Class A. They expected contestants to conform to default discursive norms that would allow a judgement on how well this was achieved. As far as they were concerned, Jenny clearly failed in that task. In her words, they “laughed weirdly, frowned, shook their heads and sneered about what I said concerning my topic”, made her feel “nervousness or even forgetting what I was going to say” and, crucially, ended up giving her “very low scores” (PBI, 4 June 2012). Fortunately for Jenny, however, there were also judges who were able and willing to suspend their expectations of default participation patterns and, prompted by her unexpected discursive behaviour, began to see Jenny as a communication partner. In other words, they came to shift their orientation to the event not simply as a space to observe and judge correct answers, but rather as an opportunity for communal meaning making. It is the latter group of judges who gave Jenny a “very high score” and in that way enabled her to proceed further in the competition. We venture to suggest that without these judges’ own emerging WTC with Jenny, her desire to make meaning and, consequently, her deep investment in language learning, may have been short-lived, as her Class A data remind us.

​

Discussion and Conclusions

​

A theoretical challenge to the official L2 WTC canon

The initial aim of this research was to understand Jenny’s WTC across her L2 communication settings and our progressive immersion in her data guided our inquiry towards two specific questions: First, does Jenny’s visible participation in classroom discourse index her willingness to communicate and second, does it matter either way? Locating the study of Jenny’s willingness at the intersection of WTC and WTP lines of inquiry has compelled us to affirm communication as central to the study of willingness and, by extension, language learning.

​

Stating this, however, does not mean endorsing one strand of research over the other. On the contrary, the intricate threads in the patterns of Jenny’s discursive behaviours across her social worlds of L2 meaning making with others have problematized the notion of communication as mere speaking that WTC research has tended to assume through its theorizing and prevalent research designs. Similarly, our study has shown that not all participation in discourse, which WTP line of inquiry has helped to make visible but has perhaps been less able to disentangle, is attributable to people’s desire to make meaning with one another. Yet, our study has shown that it is only when such communal desire is embedded, enabled and nurtured within the given discursive structures that we can meaningfully link WTC/WTP with deep and sustained investment in language learning and thus make a more confident case for the domain’s disciplinary relevance in the broader terrain of SLA and applied linguistics.

​

More specifically, our findings present a significant theoretical challenge to the official L2 WTC canon in their insistence on the central place of a reciprocal person-to-person communication in peoples’ WTC. The data have shown WTC as emerging inside such communication, rather than as a characteristic that individuals pre-possess and that different communicative circumstances either facilitate or hinder. The distinction is crucial for it suggests that although this emerging, rather than pre-existing, capacity includes individuals’ here-and-now “action control” (MacIntyre & Doucette, 2010, p. 8), it also unmistakably signals the ineradicable and consequential role of the other persons’ contribution to it. This, we argue, is an ontological as much as an epistemological insight, which alters not simply the way we research, but how we talk about the thing we research. Our refashioned definition of WTC as persons’ emerging capacity to participate in acts of L2 meaning making with one another reflects this shift with a major theoretical, analytical and, ultimately, ethical consequence: WTC may not be easily accounted for as an individual difference, regardless of the number of factors that may be theorized to constitute and shape its complex and dynamic whole (cf. Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015). Instead, because WTC essentially arises inside a particular human relationship rather than in an individual, the unit of analysis must be re-oriented accordingly. The future research effort towards this re-orienting is as much a question of scientific rigour as it is one of responsible science (Geertz, 2000).

​

Towards a third way of researching L2 WTC

Our research has shown that recent efforts to investigate individuals’ willingness by adopting an epistemological orientation of the WTP paradigm have much to offer to the study of WTC conceptualized as persons’ emerging capacity to participate in acts of L2 meaning making with one another. This broader EMCA perspective to SLA, as Kasper and Wagner (2018) remind us, pays attention to how objects of inquiry, which include WTC, are brought into being by the participants through their joint action. WTP line of inquiry, which is fully rooted in EMCA, is therefore aptly positioned to contribute to the challenging new agenda for WTC which places person-to-person communication at its centre.

​

We took inspiration from this line of inquiry and by so doing departed fundamentally from the prevalent cognitivist orientation of the traditional L2 WTC inquiry. At the same time, we readily acknowledge our study’s limitations in generating the analytical detail that EMCA deems essential. It is quite likely, for instance, that taking an EMCA-informed fine-grained and multimodal approach to collecting and analysing interactional data across Jenny’s communication settings might have brought into a sharper relief some of the layers of findings that we were only able to unearth through our recourse to alternative sources of data, such as photo-based interviews. We fully endorse an analytical commitment to studying acts of communication both in the classroom and “in the wild” (Theodórsdóttĭr, 2018) as a particularly promising direction for future WTC inquiry. At the same time, however, focusing our analytical lens on action as EMCA does while using additional tools of grounded theory ethnography has allowed us not only to build on research advanced by WTP but also to surpass its analytical and theoretical reach.

The grounded theory ethnographic approach that we adopted for this study draws on its anthropological heritage in the conviction that researching people’s communication and, by the same token, their desire to participate in it, involves “direct, intimate, and more or less disturbing encounters with the immediate details of contemporary life” (Geertz, 2000, p. 22). Inherent in this conviction is the recognition that this desire or willingness is “managed immediately and subtly through the normative resources of interaction” (Potter, 2012, p. 576). But this approach also acknowledges with humility that the meaning of that which is visible may not be readily obvious to the analyst without painstaking piecing together other pieces of the mosaic. Although this diverges somewhat from the philosophical underpinnings of EMCA (but see Waring et al., 2012), we see this “third way” of researching as contributing just as vigorously to the larger project of revisiting psychological concepts in research on language learning and teaching from the praxeological perspective (Kasper & Wagner, 2018; Kubanyiova, 2019; Kubanyiova & Feryok, 2015).

​

Implications for managing communication in instructional settings

Finally, the newly re-theorized WTC makes an appeal for classroom pedagogy that departs radically from typical calls for creating communicative environments through tasks, techniques or topics. In contrast with some of the principles of task-based language teaching (TBLT), for instance, our study shows that what students talk about seems to be of lesser than assumed consequence to their WTC and to their deep investment in language learning. What does matter is that they do so in the context in which the other person is ready to receive and reciprocate in the act of meaning making.

​

Jenny was perfectly comfortable solving linguistic puzzles and engaged in languaging with her new friends in the English Corner. But she did so not as a student who “had to” abide by the institutional rules of play but rather as a friend, a food lover or a multilingual expert user, who was willing to transgress default discursive norms in the service of communal meaning making. Richards (2006, quoting Zimmerman’s (1998) framework of identity in discourse) has empirically linked these so-called “transportable identities” to the possibility of genuine conversation in the classroom, while Ushioda (2011) has extended this argument to motivational language teaching. Our findings concur but also cast further light on this relationship. They make it apparent that allowing students to “speak as themselves” (Ushioda, 2011) is a necessary but insufficient condition for nurturing their WTC.

​

Jenny showed through her engagement with language in the English competition that she was willing and ready to talk about a seemingly random vocabulary item as “herself”, even despite the expectations to the contrary. We speculated, however, that her willingness could only ever thrive in the presence of someone willing and ready to receive her message, or, in her own words, to “be astonished” or “laugh about it”. In a similar vein, creating opportunities for students to initiate speaking in their classroom, assumed by both WTC and WTP paradigms as the key index of their willingness, is only a half of the picture. The success of the other half depends on how the other, the classroom teacher in particular, acts on that initiation.

​

It must be acknowledged, however, that educators too depend for their capacity to make meaning with their students on the affordances in their wider social ecology. Jenny’s teacher, after all, may never have experienced let alone been encouraged by her sociocultural and educational environment to orient to her instructional practices as potential acts of meaning making. Similarly, her experiences, as well as those of her students, may also have been guided by some unhelpful language ideologies impacting on their communal desire to make meaning with one another (Subtirelu, 2014). Curricular initiatives tasked with enhancing students’ communication in the classroom may thus need to begin with a broader reflection on how language educators can be supported through language teacher education and wider cultural practices (cf. Kubanyiova, 2018).