A language ideological perspective on willingness to communicate

The author argues that theoretical and empirical accounts of willingness to communicate (WTC) would benefit from consideration of the linguistic anthropological concept of language ideology. In particular, within WTC models, experiences with second language (L2) communication are conceptualized as a key aspect of L2 users' perceptions of their communicative competence, itself an important aspect of WTC. The relationship between these communicative experiences and L2 users' self-evaluations of their L2 is mediated by language ideology. This argument is supported by interview data from longitudinal case studies demonstrating participants' radically different interpretations of the same or similar communicative events mediated by two different language ideologies – deficit and lingua franca ideologies. Ideological assumptions lead participants working with a deficit ideology to interpret certain communicative events as evidence of their own linguistic deficiency suggesting negative effects for their WTC. However, the same or similar events were interpreted radically differently by one participant drawing on a lingua franca ideology. Finally, these findings suggest the need for critical pedagogical approaches to language education that interrogate deficit language ideologies in an attempt to promote WTC.