Bilingual/multilingual learners’ willingness to communicate in and anxiety on speaking Chinese and their associations with self-rated proficiency in Chinese

The present research explored bilingual/multilingual students' willingness to communicate in Chinese (WTCC) and foreign language anxiety (FLA) when speaking Chinese and their associations with self-rated proficiency in Chinese in a university in Beijing. The study recruited 167 bilingual and multilingual learners of Chinese to fill in a battery of questionnaires, 15 of whom were interviewed. Analyses of the data revealed the following major findings: (1) most participants were willing to communicate in Chinese and did not feel anxious when doing so, (2) both WTCC and FLA were closely related to self-rated proficiency in Chinese and powerful predictors for the latter, and vice versa, (3) WTCC and FLA were significantly related to and predicted each other and (4) a number of factors were identified to be causes for the learners' WTCC and FLA. Evidently, both willingness to communicate and FLA are complicated constructs and issues of great concern even to experienced language learners, which deserve continuous research.