Willingness to communicate in a foreign language in the four skills. Sex and age differences

Abstract

The object of this research was to validate the Willingness to communicate in a foreign language in the four skills in the Classroom Scale to a Spanish speaking context. Taking the study of authors (in press) as a starting point, this instrument validation will allow to obtain information about the student FLL motivation in CLIL in regular schools. This would allow researchers and teachers to have a valid instrument that provides information about the four language skills in FLL or CLIL programmes. In addition, as part of the construct validity analysis, sex and age differences are explored in order to obtain a student profile regarding Willingness to communicate in a foreign language in the four skills. The WTC-FL in the four skills adaptation was administered to a total of 3355 students from Andalusia aged from 11 to 17 years. After the translation and adaptation processes, item and internal structure analyses were conducted. Other analyses have shown this instrument to be sex-invariant and to have convergent validity. A multi-level model analysis was also conducted in order to study the construct validity, concluding with similar results from similar studies.