Att vilja och våga samtala på målspråket : Faktorer som påverkar elevers vilja och förmåga till muntilig interaktion på franska

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to deepen the knowledge about factors that influence students’ willingness and ability to oral interaction in a target language, in this case French. It also aimed to achieve a clearer picture of the tasks the students work with and would like to work with in classroom situations. The study was based on two theoretical frameworks, Willingness to Communicate, which looks into the social and affective factors enhancing the will to communicate, and Task Based Language Teaching investigating how tasks can be designed to promote oral interaction between students in a classroom or in a digital environment. Based on the purpose of the study three research questions were formulated. The first question was about the importance of cognitive factors to promote oral interaction. The second focused on the role Willingness to Communicate and other affective factors play to make students willing to communicate in the target language. The third question aimed at investigating to what extent task-based language teaching occurs in teaching to create opportunities for students to interact in the target language. The design of the study was made up of qualitative personal interviews with students from upper secondary schools in the Stockholm area. In total seven students were interviewed, six of them studying French 4, one of them French 3.  All students highlighted cognitive and linguistic factors as being the most important to interact orally, foremost vocabulary and pronunciation and also the ability to express themselves orally. The students did not consider grammar as an important factor to their willingness and ability to communicate in French. Self-confidence, self-efficacy and the teacher’s attitude are the most important social and affective factors influencing the willingness to communicate. The ones that were considered the least important were anxiety, knowing your speaking partner and the topic of the conversation. The students’ opinion of the least important factors differed from research and empirical studies, which rate these factors higher. The students reported that the teaching did not include Task Based Language Teaching as defined in the theory and that limited use of computer mediated communication was used in the classroom. All students express a desire to communicate and interact with each other more than they do at present as well as to work with tasks and tools both face-to-face and digital enabling this to happen.