Motivational Individual Differences and the Communicative English Output of Japanese Learners: A Psychometric and Predictive Study

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The project was approved in September 2021, and data collection took place from October 2021 to January 2022. Data analysis and corpus construction took place from January 2022 to August 2022. Starting in August 2022, the research was presented in the form of research reports, and two papers are currently under review at international journals, with a third in preparation. The project was proposed as a psychometric and predictive endeavor, and the research achievements are presented as such.Psychometric Findings: International Posture was observed to have poor underlying psychometric properties and was excluded from the analysis. Willingness-to-communicate (WTC), speaking (task) self-efficacy (SSE), and perceived communicative competence (PCC), on the other hand, had good psychometrics, with adequate internal and external validity and reliability. SSE and PCC bordered on having a discriminant validity issue, but their association was below the lenient r < .90 threshold. These findings were cross-validated using an EFA->CFA process, where both samples exceeded 200 participants. SSE was also piloted beforehand on 130 learners as it was a new instrument.Predictive Findings: In the testing sample (N = 230), WTC, SSE, and PCC all had moderate and positive associations (.38 < r < .47) with speaking task output. In the multivariate models, only WTC was significant, and it explained about 22% of the variance of the dependent variable. Interestingly, WTC was observed to mediate the relationships of both SSE and PCC with the dependent variable.