The present chapter is intended to accomplish two major goals. First, it provides a justification for the adoption of a micro perspective in the study of willingness to communicate (WTC) which, as is forcibly argued, should be viewed as complimenting, extending and contextualising the insights stemming from large-scale questionnaire studies, involving hundreds of participants as well as reliance on complex statistical procedures. Second, it sheds light on the design of the research project and considers the crucial methodological considerations involved in conducting it. With this goal in mind, the aims and research questions will be specified, the characteristics of the participants in the three groups will be presented and the nature and progress of the speaking classes under investigation will be addressed. Additionally, the instruments employed in the process of data collection will be described and the analyses to which these data were subjected will then be spelled out.

The Rationale for Adopting a Micro-Perspective in the Study of WTC

As was argued by the present authors in their previous publications (e.g. Pawlak, 2012a, 2013a, in press; Pawlak & Mystkowska-Wiertelak, 2015; Pawlak et al., 2014, 2016) with respect to such individual learner differences as motivation, grammar learning strategies (GLS) and WTC, while there is certainly a need for large-scale questionnaire studies which enable us to identify certain trends and tendencies in large populations as well as to determine factors that may influence those tendencies or to come up with models proposing relationships between such variables, such an approach in itself is insufficient to help us fully comprehend the role of individual learner differences and the ways in which they interact. Thus, there is an urgent need to complement research of this kind with empirical investigations that would be much more context-sensitive in the sense that they would yield insights into how a variable in question (e.g. motivational intensity) enters into complex interactions with a myriad of other factors, both situational (e.g. task type, the teacher, group dynamics) and individual (e.g. individual learner profiles) in nature, and how such interactions can mediate the effectiveness of the processes of teaching and learning.