Effect of Teacher Academic Support on Learner Social Engagement in EFL Classrooms: Chain Mediation of Perseverance of Effort and Willingness to Communicate

Social engagement and its relationships with other constructs are underexplored despite the especial importance for foreign language learning. Teacher support predicts academic engagement; however, the specific mechanism associating teacher support, particularly teacher academic support (TAS) with learner social engagement (SE) in the EFL learning context remains unaffirmed. Furthermore, perseverance of effort (POE) and willingness to communicate (WTC) are under the impact of teachers and can promote academic engagement. Nevertheless, how these two variables are related to social engagement needs further exploration. This study was designed to examine the relationship between the above constructs in EFL classrooms. The data for this research was collected by surveying 353 Chinese undergraduate students through a questionnaire investigation. SPSS 27.0 and AMOS 27.0 were employed to perform descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and structural equation modeling. The research findings indicated that (1) TAS, POE and WTC were direct predicators of SE; (2) TAS, mediated by POE, had an indirect impact upon SE; (3) POE was a direct predictor of WTC, through which it influenced SE indirectly; (4) TAS, through the chain mediation of POE and WTC, indirectly influenced SE. Overall, TAS, POE and WTC explained 61.00% of the variance of SE altogether. What’s more, the indirect effect of TAS on SE was larger than the direct effect; the former accounted for 54.63% of total effect of TAS and the latter 45.37%. The findings of this research may be helpful for enriching related studies and enhancing the effectiveness of EFL teaching and learning.