Creating Willingness to Communicate through L2 blogging

Abstract

This paper uses the concept of Willingness to Communicate to discuss the conditions leading to language production in L2 blogging. It provides an overview of the concept, which has been defined as a “readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using a L2” (MacIntyre, Dörnyei, Clément & Noels, 1998, p. 547) and proposes that the choice of a different channel of communication, blogs, affects a language learner’s willingness to communicate. The discussion is based on the experiences of 15 language learners who used a blog for self-reflection and learner-to-learner interaction as part of a tertiary German language course. The analysis of the collected data (blog entries, focus group interviews) showed that blogs are perceived as protected spaces (Gumbrecht, 2004) in which L2 learners gain L2 confidence and seek opportunities for L2 use. The paper concludes with four suggestions on how blog learning environments can create willingness to communicate.