Schrödinger's turn: An interactional examination of willingness to communicate and talk in codependent and competitive group talk

Language learners are often required to negotiate classroom participation in pair and group work; therefore, willingness to communicate (WTC) could be a key determiner of second language (L2) success. Classroom WTC is volatile and influenced by interlocutor-related variables, such as reciprocal identities, group membership and atmosphere, and peer support; however, these antecedents are often studied from a psychological or ecological standpoint, in which learners’ cognitive and affective reactions to environmental factors are examined. These examinations rarely measure talk itself; however, it has been suggested that a key WTC factor is conversational behaviors. Talk and WTC arise in a communicative space negotiated between all interlocutors; therefore, this article positions conversational maneuvers, such as turn-taking and floor sharing, as key determiners of WTC. Idiodynamic data from 16 English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classroom conversations showed that (a) dependent on learner reactions, conversational floortime could manifest codependent and competitive facets, (b) EFL learners’ WTC and participation was highly dependent on experienced English users’ facilitating maneuvers, and (c) more voluble EFL students took better advantage of the affordances their experienced counterparts provided than taciturn students. Given the ultimate goal of out-of-class WTC and L2 contact, the findings have important implications for training EFL learners in communicative maneuvers to control conversational floortime.