The Relationship Between L2 Motivational Self System and Willingness to Communicate: A Three-Level Meta-Analysis

Information from the abstract

Willingness to communicate (WTC) plays a vital role in second language (L2) education and has attracted growing attention in recent years. Over the past decade, a growing body of research has explored the relationships between WTC and the three components of the L2 motivational self system (L2MSS): the ideal L2 self, the ought-to L2 self, and the L2 learning experience. Although these studies generally report significant positive associations of the ideal L2 self and the L2 learning experience with WTC, the reported effect sizes vary considerably across samples and contexts. Additionally, these studies have yet to reach consensus regarding the association between the ought-to L2 self and WTC, with studies reporting non-significant, significant positive, or significant negative effects. To date, no study has systematically synthesized evidence on the relationship between L2MSS and WTC. To fill in the gaps, this meta-analysis extracted 152 effect sizes (correlation coefficient, r ) from 53 empirical studies. The results indicated that all three components of L2MSS were positively correlated with WTC, with moderate effects for the ideal L2 self ( r = .46) and the L2 learning experience ( r = .46), and a negligible effect size for the ought-to L2 self ( r = .20). The analysis further revealed that the effect size varied across regional contexts, educational levels, target languages, statistical procedures, communicative contexts, and construct validation methods. The findings of this study also provide evidence to support the facilitative role of the L2MSS in enhancing learners’ WTC and offer pedagogical implications for L2 teachers and directions for future research.

Why this record is monitored

This record has an Impact Signal of 78/100 based on recency, source, collaboration, and bibliographic signals. It prioritizes monitoring and is not a judgment of research quality.

Related topics: EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Second Language Acquisition and Learning · Second Language Learning and Teaching