ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1634054
The relations among foreign language anxiety, academic buoyancy and willingness to communicate in EFL classroom
Provisionally accepted
- Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China
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Abstract: This study, grounded in the frameworks of Positive Psychological Resources Theory and Emotion Regulation Theory, investigated the mechanism through which foreign language anxiety (FLA) and academic buoyancy (AB) influence students’ willingness to communicate (WTC) in EFL classroom. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis based on data from 627 senior high school students and semi-structured interviews with eight randomly selected participants in China.The empirical results indicate that FLA significantly and negatively predicts WTC, while AB plays a partial mediating role in this relationship, thereby validating the proposed "FLA - AB - WTC" path model. These results highlight academic buoyancy as a positive psychological trait that mediates the effect of anxiety on willingness to communicate. This research offers theoretical and practical implications for affective regulation and psychological empowerment in foreign language pedagogy.
Keywords: Academic buoyancy, Foreign language anxiety, willingness to communicate in EFLclassroom, Structural Equation Modeling, mixed-methods
Received: 23 May 2025; Accepted: 08 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lin, Wang, Zhang and Su. 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: Baochang Wang, njubao@sina.com
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