Neural Correlates of Task-Specific Willingness to Communicate: Expanding the Research Agenda

Learners’ affective responses to pedagogic tasks and the effort that they invest in completing them are critical to the learning that takes place through tasks in task-based language teaching (TBLT) (Lambert, Aubrey, & Bui, 2023). Fluctuations in learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC) during pedagogic tasks—or task-specific WTC
(Aubrey & Yashima, 2023)—are a locus for affective and conative variation during pedagogic task performance. However, task-specific WTC is under-researched, and the research that has been conducted, while insightful, has been limited to self-report data (Khajavy, MacIntyre, Taherian, & Ross, 2021; MacIntyre & Legatto, 2011; MacIntyre
& Wang, 2021). This brief report expands the research agenda on task-specific WTC by correlating self-report measures based on moment-to-moment ratings of stimulated recalls (MacIntyre & Ducker, 2022) with physiological measures of affect response and conation afforded by electroencephalography and facial expression analysis (Lambert, 2023). The report provides evidence for neural and physiological correlates of self-reported WTC experiences and points to directions for future research on WTC in TBLT.