ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1622521
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Interconnectedness of Personality and Language Volume IIView all articles
The Relationship between Individual Differences and Spanish Achievement among Chinese Undergraduate Students
Provisionally accepted
Qi Lu1*
Eulalio Fernández Sánchez2- 1Wenzhou Business College, Wenzhou, China
- 2University of Cordoba, Cordoba, Spain
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This study investigates how three individual differences (language anxiety, expectancy-value motivation, and social identity) predict academic performance in Spanish as a foreign language among a sample of 317 Chinese undergraduate students majoring in Hispanic Philology. The results demonstrate that Chinese learners of Spanish generally possess a high level of value motivation, especially utility value, but a medium level of expectancy. Additionally, participants report a medium-low level of language anxiety in the institutional context of Spanish as a foreign language (ELE) and experience a positive trend towards changes in their social identity, particularly when it comes to self-confidence. Furthermore, achievement value and self-confidence serve as significant positive predictors of Spanish achievement, while language anxiety is the only negative predictor. Based on the above, limitations and future lines of research are also discussed.
Keywords: Expectancy-value motivation, language anxiety, Social identity, Spanish achievement, learning Spanish as a foreign language (ELE)
Received: 03 May 2025; Accepted: 18 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lu and Fernández Sánchez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Qi Lu, Wenzhou Business College, Wenzhou, China
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